Investigation of flame retardant properties of alkaline earth and alkaline borate additives to water and styrene acrylic based paints

It is known that our country has the largest boron reserves in the world. In order to support the national economy more, boron should be sold as processed form instead of being sold as raw material. From this point of view, it should be our first priority to increase the number of researches on these technologies. With the developing technology and growing industry, fire risk have also been increased in parallel. In order to minimize this risk, production of fire resistant materials has gained more attention day by day. Most of the materials that we use are covered with paints. Due to this reason, the fire retardant properties of top coat paints have to be increased. In this study, effects of several alkaline borate compounds (calcium metaborate,potassium metaborate and sodium tetraborate) on fire retardation and smoke suppression were investigated where these compounds were added to acrylic based paints physically during formulation. For comparison purposes, a paint without fire retardant was firstly prepared. In addition, ammonium polyphosphate which is known to be a good fire retardant compound was introduced and the results were compared with the paint samples prepared with borate. Any possible negative efect of these additives on the prepared paint samples were also investigated by viscosity, color suitability and brightness tests. Since some of the boron compounds are known to have antibacterial effect, samples were tested for antibacterial efficiency with the agar diffusion method. The performed tests of the additives showed no negative effect on brightness and colour suitability. Calcium metaborate was observed to increase the viscosity whereas the sodium tetraborate decreases it. Other compounds did not affect the viscosity considerably. The best result on fire retardation and smoke suppression were obtained with the samples having sodium tetraborate as additive. However, antibacterial effect was not observed in any of the prepared samples.