Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

A method of studying the swelling and thermal behavior of intumescent materials using understanding of the basic physical and chemical processes is described. The material is treated as a highly viscous fluid with properties dependent on temperature. The growth rate, migration, and thermal effects of a large number of bubbles are individually calculated using approximate analytical solutions to mass, momentum, and energy equations, and the collective behavior is obtained as a summation of the individual velocity and temperature fields. The approach and implementation of this model are described and demonstrated.