WP3 - Fire retardancy

This projects aims at producing novel fire-retardant materials that cover the environmental aspects of materials production, in particular through:

• The replacement of petroleum-based polymers with polymers from biomass
• The development of an alternative to current harmful halogen-based fire-retardant technologies

The approach for this project is to use cellulose nanofibers, a constituent of wood, as the main component and to add a high loading fraction of a bio-based and fire-retardant filler in the form of nanoclay (montmorillonite).

The typical processing route of nanocellulosic products can be used to produce fire-retardant foams or "thin film" materials. These materials have superior properties to traditional approaches due to nano-features of the building blocks, high hierarchy in the structure of materials and favorable specific degradation mechanisms for the clay-cellulose combination.