Home resilience for bushfire season has been boosted further via the ingenuity of a group of UNSW engineers, who have developed a fire-retardant paint that is the first to ever pass a number of rigorous Australian standard tests.

Commercially branded as FSA FIRECOAT and available at Bunnings, the paint achieved the Bushfire Attack Level (BAL) 40, meaning the material is able to withstand higher levels of radiant heat and ember attack during bushfire, further increasing a home’s ability to withstand extreme fire conditions.

The paint has been developed alongside Flame Security International, and was funded via a Federal Government grant. The intumescent paint expands as a result of heat exposure, with the paint’s chemicals producing a thick layer of char which deflects fire away from surfaces.

“The special additives we include in the paint mix formula promote the growth of the char, which is the important insulating element. The char is what helps the substrate, that is your house or your building, stay protected from the fire,” says UNSW Professor Guan Yeoh (pictured), Director of the ARC Training Centre for Fire Retardant Materials and Safety Technologies at UNSW.

“In the rigorous tests you can see this char being created, but at the end you can just wipe it away and the wood underneath has virtually no damage.”

firecoat UNSW

Able to be brushed or sprayed onto surfaces, ‘FIRECOAT’ can be utilised as a primer or undercoat with a topcoat placed above, given that the carbon ingredient means the product is only available in grey. This method was undertaken for a BAL -40 test where the paint was applied to radiata pine, the most combustible and commonly used timber nationwide. The paint succeeded in passing all six of the stringent criteria, the first time any paint has achieved the BAL-40 rating.

“If a building is not protected in any way and it starts to burn then it can become a source of heat for the fire to continue, like a chain reaction,” Yeoh says.

“So we can say this paint assists in limiting the spread of bushfires because it prevents a building from igniting and therefore compounding the original fire. Many people are saying that we are currently experiencing a dry season. But when it is a dry season, that often means that bushfires are just around the corner.

“We wanted to push the boundary with this paint so we did tests on probably 200 different formulas in the first couple of years of research before we arrived at the best one. That was using very high-grade materials, which would have made the paint too expensive to produce, so we then tested again with more commercially available ingredients to ensure we got the same performance in a final product that people can afford.”

Flame Security International says it is pleased with the strong collaborative research partnership established and the successful outcomes of fire safety products achieved particularly through the support of the Cooperative Research Centre project (CRC-P) Round 5 grant with UNSW.

Jarrod Reedie

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