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FR fabric result of team effort

By David Perry -- Furniture Today, April 10, 2005

Aiken, S.C. — Owens Corning assembled a team of in-house researchers and executives, outside consultants and a key supplier to tackle a high-priority project: Creating a new type of fire-resistant material for bedding.

The process began in July 2003, when the building materials company identified the emerging market for FR bedding materials as a growth opportunity.

Today, the company has crossed that first finish line with a fabric using FR and self-extinguishing fibers that are inherently fire-resistant without additional chemical treatment.

Owens Corning has applied for patents on the process and the product, which according to company officials already has won favorable reviews from a number of mattress producers. Commercial sales have begun.

The R&D team found a clever way to take a negative — a flammable bedding product — and turn it into a key part of its FR solution. Conventional thinking holds that a flammable product should be kept out of an FR solution. But the R&D team literally turned that thinking upside down.

The new Owens Corning FR fabric consists of three layers. The FR barrier is like the middle of a sandwich. It is topped with a polypropylene material. A coating on the bottom of the fabric holds the FR barrier in place. The FR fabric is used on the bottom of the single-sided beds that have rapidly gained acceptance in the bedding marketplace.

When the top layer of the FR fabric burns, it melts in place and in effect "glues" the FR system to the bottom of the single-sided mattress, thus keeping air out of the mattress and thereby helping prevent the spread of fire.

"We used a sacrificial layer as part of a system," said J.P. Blanchard, the Owens Corning executive who headed the FR project. He is business manager for Owens Corning's Veil Technologies program in North America. "This is a game-changing product."

"It is a true innovation to use polypropylene in an FR product," said Frank Land, president of McKinnon-Land, which supplies FR fibers to Owens Corning and was part of the team that developed the new product.

The materials used to create the FR fabric include a little fiberglass (Owens Corning says the exact amount is proprietary, but is between 0% and 20% of the product), PVC fibers and Basofil fibers, the inherently fire-resistant fibers that are a key product in McKinnon-Land's FR portfolio.

The small-diameter fiberglass fibers add tensile strength in the production process and also help form a char layer that promotes the integrity of the FR system.

The finished FR fabric is "an economical product with high performance characteristics," Land said.

"This product is inherently flame-resistant," said Bob McKinnon, CEO of McKinnon-Land.

Blanchard said the FR filler cloth "was designed specifically to meet strict (California) government standards for safety. The patented product also meets other industry standards for grab, tear and elongation strength."

In addition to being used on the bottom of single-sided mattresses, the FR fabric could be used in a tight-top mattress to provide complete FR protection, Land said.

Blanchard called development of the new FR cloth "an extraordinary journey," which proceeded quickly.

"In a matter of only 18 months, Owens Corning was able to successfully put that experience in action to develop this FR fabric product," he said. "It was very exciting to see the entire development process in action — and deliver a solution to this marketplace which truly allows an industry to meet safety standards in an entirely new way."

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