Cost-effective fire resisting composite materials

The CostFRM project will contribute to reduce ships energy consumption and emissions by paving the road for higher use fibre reinforced composites in shipbuilding. While composites provide superior strength to weight ratio compared with steel, their adaptation in ships construction is somewhat limited especially due to the materials combustible nature. The complexity and cost involved with constructing the vessels fire protection systems are very high, leading to a barrier for increased use of composites. Traditional fire protection solutions for composite ships require significant installation work to be performed in narrow and complex areas in the ships equipping phase. The equipping phase is the most undesired phase for such work, as the amount of workers/disciplines to perform their tasks in small spaces is a bottleneck, leading to loss of efficiency and a significant man hour cost. The project will aim to solve this problem and will develop fire resistant systems that shall be fully integrated with the composite panels and completely without post-mould labour related to fire resistance systems. All the constituent parts will be integrated in one panel during a streamlined fabrication process, resulting in higher labour efficiency and substantial cost savings for the shipbuilder. The project partners consist of the companies cDynamics in Kristiansand (project responsible), Sea Technology Group in Måløy (Sea Technology AS, Easy Form AS og Måløy Verft AS), Libra-Plast A/S in Hareid and research partner RISE in Borås, Sverige. The development targets in the project are to develop (1) a fire-resistant composite panel, (2) a fire resistant composite ship door and (3) an analytic method to predict fire spread in composites. The project progress has been lower than planned in 2021. A part of the reason for this is external circumstances where Covid-19 has led to long lead times for material. One other reason is also due to internal issues at the companies where full order books and prioritization of production has led to lower priority of the project in periods. Although these issues, the year has given good results. - Cooperation is established with both a large European supplier of materials and smaller Nordic suppliers. - Work package 1 part 1 is completed defining the scope and solutions for initial material tests. - Literature study completed as preparation for the development of an analytic method within fire spread estimation (work package 4). Due to the internal circumstances mentioned above some of the project scope has been redistributed towards the end of 2021. The production of small-scale samples will be moved from Easy Form to cDynamics. This is done to secure project progress to ensure the project targets are reached.

The project partners aim to develop methods and solutions that further enable the use of fiber reinforced polymers (FRP, but from here on referred to as “composites” for readability) in light weight marine vessels. While composites provide a superior strength to weight ratio compared with steel, their adaptation has stagnated because of their combustible nature. The complexity and cost involved with constructing the vessels fire protection systems are very high, leading to a barrier for increased use of composites. The development processes of fire protection solutions for maritime composite constructions is also expensive, in particular due to the cost of full-scale testing. These challenges will be effectively addressed in this innovation project. The planned innovations are two new products and one new method/service: 1. A fire resisting composite panel 2. A fire resisting composite door 3. A fire-spread model for composites The fire resisting composite panel will reduce the cost, complexity and production time of a composite vessel by a significant amount. The fire resisting composite door will enable weight savings of several tons for each vessel, and also reduce the interface complexity between panels and doors. The new model will reduce the cost of composite testing, which will benefit the shipbuilding industry in both time and development cost.