Enhancing Fire Resistance and Mechanical Properties of Wood Strand Boards by Impregnation with Sodium Bicarbonate and Sodium Borate
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The development of halogen-free flame-retardant formulations for wood-based panels is a promising strategy to improve both fire safety and environmental performance. In this study, oriented strand boards (OSB) were impregnated with aqueous solutions of sodium borate (SBo) and sodium bicarbonate (SBi) to evaluate their combined effects on fire resistance and mechanical properties. Fire performance was assessed using the ASTM D3806 small-scale tunnel test, while mechanical and physical properties were measured according to ASTM D1037. Significant improvements in fire performance were observed: mass loss (ML) during flammability testing decreased by 38% (from 6.9% to 4.3%), flame spread speed (FSS) was reduced by more than 50% (from 6.8 to 3.3 mm/s), and after-flame times (AFT) dropped from 17.2 s to 0 s. Thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) further confirmed enhanced thermal stability, with increased char residue (from 16.9% in untreated boards to 31.5% in treated ones). Mechanical testing revealed a 16% increase in internal bond (IB) strength (from 0.44 to 0.51 MPa), while modulus of rupture (MOR) and modulus of elasticity (MOE) were only slightly affected (decreased by up to 4.2% and 3.6%, respectively). Interestingly, the two additives exerted contrasting effects: SBo reduced strength and bonding performance, whereas SBi improved internal bond strength and dimensional stability. The optimal balance was obtained with treatment P250-50 (250 g SBi and 50 g SBo), which combined enhanced fire resistance with acceptable mechanical integrity. Overall, the results demonstrate that the synergistic use of SBo and SBi offers an effective halogen-free approach to simultaneously enhance the fire resistance and mechanical performance of OSB panels, highlighting its potential for industrial applications.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".