Hospitals, shopping malls, subways, schools and other crowded places have extremely high requirements for the fire safety of wall decoration materials.
A prefabricated decoration panel that meets Class A non-combustible standards and is lightweight, high-strength, moisture-proof and sound-insulating has always been a key material in short supply in the industry.
Last year, good news came from this field: Shandong Lutai Prefabricated Decoration Materials Co., Ltd. and Qilu University of Technology jointly researched the enhanced combustion performance of calcium silicate pre-coated panels and completed industrial R&D and small-scale trial production. They successfully developed A2-grade calcium silicate pre-coated panels that meet the national Class A non-combustible standards, filling the domestic technology gap and realizing the domestic replacement of high-end fire-proof pre-coated panels.
Shandong Lutai Prefabricated Decoration Materials Co., Ltd. is the only company in Tai’an City that produces a series of inorganic pre-coated panels. It is also the largest manufacturer in Jiangbei and ranks first in the same industry in the province.
In the field of medical clean decoration, the company’s technical level, product quality, and market share rank first in the country. It has been awarded many honors such as National High-tech Enterprise, Shandong Province Specialized and New Small and Medium-sized Enterprises, and Shandong Province “Morning Star Factory”. It is a benchmark enterprise in Thailand’s modular decoration industry.
Calcium silicate pre-coated panels have become the mainstream panels for prefabricated building interiors due to their advantages such as light weight, high strength, moisture resistance, and sound insulation. They are widely used in hospitals, rail transit, schools, shopping malls and other crowded places.
However, due to the limitations of organic fibers in the base material and traditional coating processes, the combustion performance of ordinary calcium silicate pre-coated boards can only reach the Class B flame retardant level. It is difficult to meet the Class A non-combustible mandatory requirements for wall materials in densely populated places in GB50222-2017 “Fire Protection Design Code for Interior Decoration of Buildings”, which has become a key technical barrier restricting the development of the industry.
“After the 2018 specification was fully implemented, we sent the product to the national authoritative agency for testing. The calorific value once reached more than 8, which is more than twice the national standard value of 3.5. It cannot pass the market access threshold.” Dong Xianlin, chief engineer and director of the Technology R&D Center of Shandong Lutai Prefabricated Decoration Materials Co., Ltd. said frankly that at that time, the industry generally pursued thicker coatings and more passes to ensure the decorative effect. If the coating system was directly replaced, the entire production line would have to be overturned and the company was once in a dilemma.
Without changing the production line or subverting the original process, and adopting the most solid “stupid method”, the enterprise’s R&D team teamed up with university experts to find the optimal solution step by step.
“The core is to reduce organic matter, which is to maintain product performance and reduce calorific value. There is no shortcut, just to dig into the details little by little.” Dong Xianlin said that the team started from the two core links of base material and coating, and implemented three key process improvements.
In view of the calorific value problem caused by wood fiber in the base material, the team optimized the fiber ratio without changing the thickness and strength of the board, replacing short wood fibers with long fibers, ensuring the mechanical properties of the board through fiber overlap, while reducing the total amount of wood fiber and reducing organic components from the source.
In response to the problem of excess organic matter in the coating, the company added sanding equipment to perform fine sanding on both sides of a 3-meter × 1.2-meter large panel to greatly improve the flatness of the panel, avoid paint accumulation due to dents on the panel, and reduce the amount of coating. At the same time, the penetration sealing layer and the waterproof layer were integrated to combine the two layers of paint into one, and then used a white waterproof coating to replace the original thick white primer, directly cutting down nearly half of the amount of coating.
With the support of science and technology projects, the company has built a full-chain innovation model of “basic research-process development-pilot verification-industrialization”. Through some “cost-conscious” process improvements, the total amount of product coating has been reduced from 150 grams per square meter to about 90 grams, achieving dual optimization of performance and cost.
The product performance has been comprehensively improved: the combustion performance reaches A2 level, the gloss deviation is ≤10°, the pencil hardness is ≥2H, the acid resistance is 168h, the washing resistance is 10,000 times, the alcohol wiping resistance is 100 times, the impact resistance is qualified, the comprehensive index is better than the domestic similar products, and an independent and controllable complete set of process technology has been formed, and the comprehensive index is better than the domestic similar products.
At present, this achievement has completed industrialized research and development and small batch trial production, and has the conditions for large-scale production. It can be widely used in scenarios with extremely high fire safety requirements, such as prefabricated building interior decoration, industrial fire insulation, tunnel fire protection, and subway sound insulation enclosure.
The project has formed an annual production capacity of 2 million square meters, with annual new sales revenue of 44 million yuan and new profit of 3.5 million yuan.
In the next three years, the company’s annual production capacity will increase to 4 million square meters, and annual sales revenue will exceed 150 million yuan, driving the annual output value of the upstream and downstream industries to grow by more than 100 million yuan. The market share is expected to increase to 25%, and promote the transformation of prefabricated decoration into green, safe, and high-end.
From exceeding the standard by twice the standard to being better than the national standard, Shandong Lutai Prefabricated Decoration Materials Co., Ltd. has used grounded process innovation to solve common problems in the industry, not only achieving high-end product upgrades, but also reducing production costs, further consolidating the company’s leading position in the industry, and also injecting strong impetus into the green and safe development of Thailand’s prefabricated decoration industry.
