Project partners Sea Technology, Libra-Plast, cDynamics and RISE Research Institutes of Sweden has been awarded 5.75 MNOK by the Norwegian research council for the innovation project "Cost-effective fire resisting composite materials".
While composites provide superior strength to weight ratio compared with steel, their adaptation in ships construction is somewhat stagnating because of the 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 significant 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 outcome of the project will be new solutions for composite panel and door constructions, complying to the International code for application of fire test procedures (FTP Code).
