In fire, smoke kills more people than flames. As stretched ceiling is increasingly used for refurbishing older structures and building new ones, Alkor Draka sought to improve it by cutting down smoke emission. The quest began not with the material itself, but the means of testing smoke emission, and to beat those standards.
“The problem we met at the beginning of this innovation project was the absence of a test that would have given us a quantitative evaluation, allowing us to know if the new laboratory PVC formulations improved the fire performance in terms of smoke emission,'' says Raphaël Lesprit, R&D and Innovation manager at Alkor Draka, a member of Vulcan.
“This project began by looking for a small scale fire test to ensure the best possible correlation with the European fire test. The second step was to find the most suitable raw materials for improving smoke and to compare new laboratory PVC formulations with our current standard classified Bs2d0 using the small scale fire test,” Lesprit says.
Bs2d0 you say? Let's explain that alphabet soup:
Since 1st October 2007, all of the stretched ceilings sold in Europe must receive CE labelling wherever they are produced. Alkor Draka, is a producer of plasticized PVC (P-PVC) films for several markets and their products dedicated to the stretched ceiling market had to fulfill all the technical requirements of the European standard. Regarding fire resistance, the current version of the European standard for products dedicated to the building and construction requires a Bs2d0 classification – considering the 3 aspects of heat, smoke and dripping – based on European harmonized Single Burning Item testing.
Let’s have a closer look to these three classification criteria:
1. heat: the best level of classification is " B " for PVC based material
2. smoke : s3 is the highest smoke emission, s2 is the medium smoke emission (i.e. non optimum performance) and s1 is the lowest smoke emission
3. dripping : the best level of classification is " d0 " for PVC based material
“Our knowledge and technical skills in PVC formulation, combined with the control of our manufacturing process, allow us to reach this level of fire performance.” says Raphaël Lesprit, R&D and Innovation manager. But of course, they didn’t stop there.
“We successfully reached the highest safety performance - the best classification regarding fire reaction and smoke emission - for a PVC film dedicated to the construction and decoration market. Bs1d0 instead of Bs2d0: it means a huge decrease of smoke emission which is the main cause of death during a fire.” says Lesprit.
This success is now extended to the whole product range as they received the CE labeling that allows them to put their products on the entire European market: no matter what colors or embosses.
And the possibilities are almost limitless. From the simple principle of a stretched PVC sheet, the designers, manufacturers and installers layers strive to imagine surprising aesthetic and technical solutions to clothe your ceilings. The latest creations combine for instance stretched PVC ceilings and integrated lighting devices, acoustic ceilings, printed ceilings or air-conditioning ceilings. They allow sophisticated directions, at the same time as they offer new comforts for the users. Stretch ceilings are used in refurbishments of old or listed buildings as well as new projects, but typically include swimming pools, houses, hotels, offices and exhibitions.
Pictures source: ADDEPT
