Due to increasing demands for fire protection in high-risk environments, such as petrochemical processes and offshore platforms, so-called hydrocarbon intumescent coatings are increasingly used to protect structural steel in the event of a hydrocarbon fire. For these coatings, the fire-resistance performance is typically evaluated in a series of costly experiments with industrial-scale (i.e. 1–10 m3) furnaces, programmed to follow a standard hydrocarbon fire test curve. In this work, we propose a laboratory-scale furnace for coating evaluation, which can simulate the conditions of a typical hydrocarbon fire curve, that is, the standard UL 1709. In a case study with five hydrocarbon intumescent coating formulations, the correlation between the laboratory- and the industrial-scale furnace was investigated and a good agreement was found for the temperature progression of the coated steel plates. The physical and chemical properties of the intumescent coating chars were also similar for the two furnaces. In summary, the low-cost, time-efficient laboratory-scale furnace can provide reliable screening of hydrocarbon intumescent coatings and is recommended as a complementary tool for industrial fire tests.

中文翻译：

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用于分析碳氢化合物膨胀涂层性能的工业炉和实验室炉的比较

由于石油化工过程和海上平台等高风险环境对防火的需求不断增加，因此越来越多地使用所谓的碳氢化合物膨胀型涂料来在发生碳氢化合物火灾时保护结构钢。对于这些涂层，其耐火性能通常是在一系列昂贵的工业规模（即 1-10 立方米）熔炉实验中评估的，这些实验被编程为遵循标准的碳氢化合物燃烧测试曲线。在这项工作中，我们提出了一个实验室规模的涂层评估炉，它可以模拟典型的碳氢化合物燃烧曲线的条件，即标准 UL 1709。在五个碳氢化合物膨胀涂层配方的案例研究中，研究了实验室规模和工业规模熔炉之间的相关性，发现涂层钢板的温度进程具有良好的一致性。两种炉子的膨胀涂层炭的物理和化学性质也相似。总之，低成本、省时的实验室规模炉可以提供可靠的碳氢化合物膨胀涂层筛选，并被推荐作为工业火灾测试的补充工具。