Modern buildings must maintain their structural safety in the event of a fire. Intumescent paint is one of the precautions you can take to make your building as safe as possible, even at very high temperatures.
1Fire Protection specialises in intumescent paint and other passive fire protection solutions for commercial, residential and industrial properties.
What is intumescent paint?
Intumescent paint is a protective coating system we install to structural steel while a construction project is underway. This specialist paint provides an extra layer of fire protection for the structure of a building.
Available in both matte and gloss finishes, intumescent paint can provide up to 120 minutes of fire protection for steel structures, giving fire services the time they need to complete a safe evacuation of a building in case a fire breaks out.
It gives the building structure more chance of surviving a fire and helps keep occupants and firefighters safer, protecting people’s lives.
How do intumescent paint systems work?
Steel can reach a critical temperature when exposed to extreme heat. While this is usually around 724°, it can be higher or lower.
Once the critical temperature is reached, the structural integrity of the steel begins to deteriorate. This means it loses its ability to bear heavy loads and can collapse the building.
Intumescent paint helps to reduce the likelihood of this happening. The paint contains special chemicals which react when exposed to high temperatures. This endothermic reaction causes the paint to expand, creating a thick protective coating, or ‘char’, for the steel elements within the building’s structure.
The paint forms a char at around 120°C, long before structural steel reaches its critical temperature. The intumescent coating can expand to up to 50 times its original thickness, giving significant protection to the building’s structure and allowing more time for a safe evacuation procedure to be carried out.
How is intumescent paint applied?
Intumescent paint is applied directly to the structural steel while a building is in the construction stage, and it is most commonly sprayed onto the steel, resulting in a thin film coating that appears to be regular paint.
Intumescent paint should always be applied by experienced professionals who have all the right equipment for the job and have worked on similar projects.
Get in touch
If you are involved in a construction project and need to assure fire safety standards, please contact us, and we will be happy to advise you on intumescent paint.