FIRE RATED MATERIALS

- Akshatha
- Anjana
- Gopika
- Jyoti
- Radha
• Fire rated building materials are vital in preventing the spread of fire throughout a building, ensuring the
safety of building occupants.
• However, as with all other building materials, some products are a better choice for the environment and
human health compared to others. How these materials perform from a sustainability and health
perspective should be just as important as their fitness for purpose, cost, and other considerations.
• For example, polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDE), a class of brominated flame retardants, have
been used in a wide range of products, including building materials, foams and textiles. People are
typically exposed to PBDEs through common household dust to which these chemicals stick after
migrating from furniture and building products. They do not degrade in the environment and have
emerged as a major environmental pollutant.
• Specific building components or assemblies such as walls, floor/ceilings, and doors to be characterized
in terms of "fire resistance" and require exposed materials to be characterized in terms of "flame spread."
• Flame spread relates to the potential for fire growth within a structure.
• A given rehabilitation project will most likely go through several stages. The preliminar evaluation process
involves surveying the prospective building, where the flame spread performance and fire resistance
performance of existing building materials and construction systems are identified
and compared to local code requirements.
Hierarchy of Classification:
The expected performance of construction materials as follows:
• Noncombustible – Best performance for both flame spread and penetration.
• Fire resistance – Fire Resistant construction – Rely on assembly rating for resistance to
fire penetration
• Ignition Resistant – Provides information regarding flame spread. Materials with this
classification can be expected to perform better than combustible materials but not as well
as noncombustible.
• Combustible – Materials with this classification will not perform as well as the others
discussed in this article, given a comparable fire exposure.

Final evaluation and design solution:

The final building evaluation begins after the rehabilitation project has reached the final design stage and the choice has been
made to retain certain archaic materials and assemblies. By this point, the specific fire resistance and flame spread
requirements will have been determined for the project. This may involve having the local building and fire officials review the
field drawings and evaluations recorded in the worksheets.

• Fire rating test ( min 20 miutes under constant heat to required fire rating in hours)
• Burning brand test (min 40 minutes under constant heat to required fire rating in hours)
Classification :
The most widely accepted flame-spread classification system appears in the National Fire
Protection Association Life Safety Code, NFPA No. 101. This Code groups the following classes
in accordance with their flame-spread and smoke development:

• Class A - Flame-spread 0-25, smoke developed 0-450. (Has highest degree of resistance.)
• Class B - Flame-spread 26-75, smoke developed 0-450.
• Class C - Flame-spread 76-200, smoke developed 0-450.

Commonly used building materials :

1. TIMBER
2. BRICK
3. STONE
4. STEEL
5. CONCRETE
6. GLASS
7. PLASTER OR MORTAR
 TIMBER
Wood is the oldest material used by humans for construction
after stone. Exceptionally strong relative to its weight
• A good heat and electrical insulator
• It is a renewable and biodegradable resource.
• Environmentally friendly
• Strong and lightweight
• Easy to install, Durable, Cost effective, Flexible.
• Timber has a unique property of self insulation and slow
burning and offers considerable resistance to fire .
• Additional fire resistance is achieved through impregnation of
timber with large quantities of fireretarding chemicals .
• The commonly used chemical for this purpose are
ammonium phosphate and sulphate, borax and boric acid,
zinc chloride etc.
• This treatment retards increase in temperature during fire,
decrease rate of flame spread
 BRICK
• Bricks are used for building and pavement all throughout the
world. Bricks are usually laid flat and are usually bonded
forming a structure to increase its stability and strength.
• Common Burnt Clay Bricks
• Sand Lime Bricks
• Engineering Bricks
• Concrete Bricks
• Fly ash Clay Bricks.
• First class bricks moulded from good clay can stand exposure
to fire for a considerable length of time .
• The properties of bricks which render them fire resistant are
the materials of construction and the component of fire
resistive materials in brick i.e. clay.
 STONE
• The usage of stone in a fire resistive construction should be
strictly restricted to the minimum.
• Hot stone when subjected to sudden cooling develops
crack and can lead to failure of structure.
• Lime stone is least recommended as it get ruined by an
ordinary fire.
• Only compact sand stone having fine grains may be used as
it can stand the exposure to moderate fire without serious
cracks.

STEEL
• Steel has a very low fire resistance value.
• With increase in temperature, the co-efficient of elasticity
of metal falls appreciably rendering the structural
members soft and free to expand.
• When the members in this state came in contact with
water used for extinguishing the fire, they tend to contract,
twist or distort and thus the stability of the entire structure
is endangered
 CONCRETE
Concrete is a composite material composed mainly of water, aggregate, and cement.
Often, additives and reinforcements (such as rebar) are included in the mixture to
achieve the desired physical properties of the finished material.
• Normal concrete
• High Strength Concrete High strength
• High Performance Concrete
• Light Weight Concrete
• Self-Compacting Concrete
• Shotcrete
• Pervious Concrete.
• The influence of fire on concrete varies with the nature of its coarse aggregate and
its density. It has been noticed that in an average fire, the concrete surface gets
disintegrated for a depth of about 25mm. This is due to the de hydration of mortar shotcrete
in concrete by the fire. Hence in a reinforced concrete fire resistant construction, the
thickness of clear cover should be more.

High strength Self compacting

Pervious concrete
Light concrete
 GLASS
Glass is an amorphous solid material which is often transparent and has widespread
practical, technological, and decorative usage
• Flat Glass
• Fiber Glass
• Laminated Safety Glass
• Tempered Safety Glass
• Colored Structural Glass
• Glass Building Blocks
• Heat Resistant Glass
• Glass for Electrical Uses
• Glass conduct heat faster than metal because of its low thermal conductivity .
When glass is subjected to sudden and extreme variation of temperature, it
fractures or cracks.
• By the use of glass reinforced with steel wire netting, such cracks can be
minimized . The reinforced glass has a higher melting point then the ordinary
glass, and such it is commonly used for fire resisting doors, windows, sky-lights
etc.
 PLASTER / MORTAR
Plaster Is a building material used for coating walls and ceilings.
• Mortar Is a workable paste used to bind building blocks such as stones, bricks,
and concrete masonry units together, fill and seal the irregular gaps between
them, and sometimes add decorative colors or patterns in masonry walls.
• Plaster or mortar are incombustible and as such, by suitable choice of the
type of mortar, the walls or ceiling of a building can be made more fire
resistant
• The resistance of the plaster to fire hazards can be increased by using it in
thicker layer

FIRE RESISTANT BUILDING MATERIALS:

BRICK

GLASS
CONCRETE STUCCO GYPSUM
 FIRE RESISTANT GLASS
Glass is a poor conductor of heat and expends little during heating. Cracks are formed
in glass when it is cooled after heating.
• Windows, important for visibility and light, can nonetheless be a fire hazard. Even
before a window is in direct contact with flames, the intense heat of a nearby fire
can cause the glass to break. And a broken window allows flames to enter a
building easily.
• In addition, the heat from a fire outside might be enough to simply ignite
flammable items inside a home without direct contact. To protect your house,
consider installing fire-resistant windows.
• One example is dual-paned glass windows, which double the time it would take for
fire to break the windows. The outer layer will break first before the inner layer.

CONCRETE
• It is one of the most common building materials, is also an excellent fire-resistant
material. It is noncombustible and has low thermal conductivity, meaning that it
takes a long time for fire to affect its structural, load-bearing ability, and it protects
from the spread of fire.
• It's actually significantly more fire-resistant than steel, and often used to reinforce
and protect steel from fire. The exact fire-resistance properties change depending
on the type and amount of aggregate used. Concrete is often listed among the best
fire resistant roofing materials
 STUCCO
Stucco is a material made of an aggregate, a binder, and water. It is used as decorative
coating for walls and ceilings and as a sculptural and artistic material in architecture.
• Stucco may be used to cover less visually appealing construction materials such as metal,
concrete or clay brick and adobe.
• Modern stucco is made of Portland cement, sand and lime, and it serves as an excellent
and durable fire-resistant finish material for buildings. It can cover any structural material,
such as brick or wood.
• It usually consists of two or three coats over metal reinforcing mesh. A one-inch (2.54-
centimeter) layer of stucco can easily lend a 1-hour fire rating to a wall

GYPSUM
Many structural materials will require underlying gypsum sheathing in order to achieve a good
fireresistant rating, and gypsum board is the most commonly used fire-resistant interior finish.
• Gypsum board, also known as drywall, consists of a layer of gypsum sandwiched between two
sheets of paper. In addition, gypsum board has a noncombustible core that contains chemically
combined water (in calcium sulfate).
• When affected by fire, the first thing that happens is that this water comes out as steam. This
effectively impedes the transfer of heat through the gypsum board. And even after the water is
gone, the gypsum core continues to resist fire penetration for a time.
• Builders often use multiple layers of gypsum board to increase the fire-resistance rating.