Painting fire is key to the construction of buildings with metal structures

Today security is part of our culture and one of the aspects of safety in buildings is fire protection. Fire is a significant risk to occupants of buildings, having an extra layer of protection to generate those extra minutes can mean the difference between life and death.

Most modern buildings use metal structures. The metal to interact with the fire changes its plasticity, which makes a structure that is unstable. At 500 degrees Celsius steel loses its structural strength. MontoFoc, such is an intumescent paint, which means that by the action of heat or fire is transformed through chemical processes and creates an insulating foam of low thermal conductivity can increase 30 times its original thickness. This will effectively separates the structure fire, giving the occupants of the building the time (from 15 minutes to two hours), to evacuate the building.

The fire temperature can range from 500 degrees Celsius to about 980 degrees Celsius within a building. In extreme fire in a building cases can reach temperatures above 800 degrees Celsius, but in this case the normal temperatures of the fires that are greater than 500 degrees are able to turn iron into malleable material that has no type of structural resistance in a building. That is why it requires protection with intumescent paint as Montofoc because it will protect the structure for valuable minutes, meaning that the structure will stand for a little more time can mean the difference between life and death when evacuating a building that is on fire.

The amount of intumescent paint to be applied to protect structures is not arbitrary, there are safety standards that determine it. It is clear that a thicker layer provide protection during a fire will last (minutes) but it depends on the massiveness of each profile, set fire stability of each element of the structure and tables stability as approval of painting based on laboratory results.