There seem to be many flame retardants for wood, and there are surprisingly few at present. Various chemicals have been used, but boric acid is effective for making wood flame-retardant.
Soufa manufactured by our company is supplied to the market as a highly effective flame retardant for cellulose.
Boric acid has long been known to have a flame retardant effect. Therefore, wood can be made flame retardant by soaking boric acid in the wood.
But the effect is small. The reason is that it is difficult to soak boric acid into wood. This is because boric acid is inherently hardly soluble in water and dissolves at most only about 4%. Therefore, a large amount of water was needed to penetrate the wood, and it was thought that it was not suitable for practical use.
In order to overcome these problems, research has been conducted on methods of forcibly creating a high-concentration aqueous solution by applying pressure or decompression or mixing other components with the drug itself.
However, there is a drawback that it takes a long time to process if abundant repetition of pressurization and decompression is repeated, and it is not possible to overcome problems such as the fact that flame retardants mixed with other components do not penetrate wood in the first place.
So SOUFA we offer is trying to open up the future. SOUFA has the technology to dissolve up to 30% or more components in water at room temperature using only boric acid as the main raw material.
Very high concentration boric acid aqueous solution. Since it does not contain surfactants or other solvents, it has a very high permeability to wood, and can penetrate chemicals to the level of non-combustible wood without pressure and pressure reduction.
It is said that non-combustible wood currently in circulation has some disadvantages.
That is efflorescence and leaching. Efflorescence means that the wood surface becomes white.
And leaching is that the drug comes out on the wood surface and becomes sticky. Some materials seem to leach out like dew condensation, so there is a problem in using them as products. In general, non-combustible wood is coated by painting, but it still did not solve the problem.
Although boric acid is considered to be the main cause of efflorescence, efflorescence has not been observed in wood impregnated with SOUFA. Unlike ordinary non-combustible wood, it can be painted because it keeps the texture of wood.
There is no need to worry because ammonium phosphate, which is the cause of leaching, is not used.
The chemicals used as wood flame retardants are ammonium borate, phosphoric acid, and nitrocellulose resin coatings / inorganic phosphoric acid / melamine agents, acrylic resin coatings, hydrous borate / inorganic phosphate agents Drugs, etc.
However, companies that have obtained non-combustibility certification for these drugs have suffered from poor performance several years ago. Since then, the standards for certified noncombustible wood have become very strict, and new noncombustible certified wood has become quite difficult. From our research, it will be difficult to make wood non-combustible with chemical treatments other than SOUFA.
Most of the non-combustible woods currently on the market are products that have obtained non-combustible certification before the standards became strict.
We are currently conducting basic experiments to obtain noncombustibility certification.
As the verification values for the test pass level are almost complete, preparations are underway to obtain a certification number.