Got Questions on Fire/Smoke Tests or Specs for Plastics in Public Transportation?

Find answers, expressed simply, but in detail, in a clearly organized new paperback book (192 pp.), “Flammability, Smoke & Combustion Toxicity Requirements for Comosites, Plastics, Textiles, and Other Materials Used in: Planes, Trains, Buses, and Cruise Ships.”

The book is published by a materials and fire-code consulting firm, the Govspec Group, Inc., N.Y.C., and is written by its founder, Salvatore Messina. He has over 50 years’ experience in the area of fire testing, including product development, designing and manufacturing fire-test instruments, and founding a major fire-testing laboratory (Govmark, now called SGS Govmark).

The book is divided into four chapters on Passenger Aircraft; U.S. Passenger Trains, Buses & Vans; European Railway Fire Tests; and Cruise Ships—International Fire Tests for Passenger Vessels. Each chapter enumerates the various U.S. and European agency requirements for various materials and components, followed by descriptions of each of the required fire and smoke tests (including Boeing and Airbus test methods, for example) with illustrations of the test apparatus and procedure.

The book is available at Amazon Textbooks for $124.

One of my first assignments at Plastics Technology magazine was to cover the plastics additives “beat,” and I always found flame retardants and smoke suppressants to be one of the most exciting areas to report on. Amid the rapidly evolving welter of flame and smoke specs and test methods, I would have welcomed a book like this to lay it all out in straightforward, easy-to-navigate fashion. The author acknowledges that much of the information in his book can be found for free, “if you take the time to search the web,” but he adds, “I think the strong point of the book is the description of the pass/fail criteria for each test mode. That's not so easy to find.”