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Flame-Resistant Polymer Coating

Dr. Jaime Grunlan, an associate professor of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University, talks about the flame-resistant polymer coating he has developed. The anti-flammable technology is based on inorganic clay platelets mixed with polymers to make a very thin nano-coating on both foam and fabric.

Topics:
Coatings & Adhesives Consumer Product Manufacturing Defense Manufacturing & Prototyping Materials Nanotechnology

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    Transcript

    00:00:03 my laboratory is called the polymer nanocomposites laboratory so everything we do is polymers and nanocomposite related the process we saw today was an anti-flammable technology that's based on inorganic clay platelets mixed with polymers and to make a very thin nano coating on both

    00:00:24 foam and fabric and we showed the layer by layer deposition process that we used and this process deposits coatings onto fibers or the walls of open celled foam and that is on the order of anywhere from 10 to a couple of hundred nanometers so everything is below one micrometer in thickness so in most cases the coating is completely

    00:00:48 transparent you don't know it's on the fabric or the foam therefore the foam stays flexible the fabric stays soft it just imparts anti-flammable behavior instead of taking anything away so right now we're envisioning a number of applications we've got interest from the army we've got interest from a bedding manufacturer additionally

    00:01:10 clothing in general needs to be less flammable we keep we hear stories every year about children being burned or even laboratory workers being burned because something spills on them in the laboratory and they don't even have time to get to a safety shower so this issue of the flammability being reduced

    00:01:28 definitely for clothing furnishings what they call soft furnishings for beds for furniture you know all of your furniture most of it has at least has fabric on it and that fabric if someone drops a cigarette or in in some other way it catches fire that often leads to the whole house burning down but once again if you had anti-flammable fabric

    00:01:50 it would dramatically reduce property loss that's so that's a major issue uh and then insulating foam for commercial buildings is another big application for this technology and so we've got interest from fortune 500 companies that work in the polyurethane foam industry that very much want to have this technology