Estimating the impact of the mattress fire safety Standard 16 CFR Part 1633 on bed fire outcomes.

Beds are a prevalent combustible in fatal fires in the United States effective 1 July 2007, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission promulgated a standard to severely reduce the heat release rate and the early heat output from mattresses and foundations when ignited by a flaming ignition source. This study estimates the Standard's success over its first decade using fire incidence, US population, and mattress sales data. The technique mitigates the influence of some exogenous factors that might have changed during this decade. The Standard is accomplishing its purpose, preventing approximately 65 fatalities (out of an estimated 95 fatalities in 2002-2005) from bed fires annually during 2015-2016, although not all pre-Standard mattresses had yet been replaced. Compared to residential upholstered furniture fires, which were not affected by the Standard, the numbers of bed fires decreased by 12%, injuries by 34%, and deaths by 82% between 2005-2006 and 2015-2016. Per bed fire, injuries decreased by 25% and fatalities decreased by 67%, indicating that the severity of bed fires is being reduced.

Rapid growing clay coatings to reduce the fire threat of furniture.

Layer-by-layer (LbL) assembly coatings reduce the flammability of textiles and polyurethane foam but require extensive repetitive processing steps to produce the desired coating thickness and nanoparticle fire retardant content that translates into a fire retardant coating. Reported here is a new hybrid bi-layer (BL) approach to fabricate fire retardant coatings on polyurethane foam. Utilizing hydrogen bonding and electrostatic attraction along with the pH adjustment, a fast growing coating with significant fire retardant clay content was achieved. This hybrid BL coating exhibits significant fire performance improvement in both bench scale and real scale tests. Cone calorimetry bench scale tests show a 42% and 71% reduction in peak and average heat release rates, respectively. Real scale furniture mockups constructed using the hybrid LbL coating reduced the peak and average heat release rates by 53% and 63%, respectively. This is the first time that the fire safety in a real scale test has been reported for any LbL technology. This hybrid LbL coating is the fastest approach to develop an effective fire retardant coating for polyurethane foam.