Plasma aided flame retardation of wood, wooden products and cellulosic materials

The plasma aided flame retardation of wood, wooden products and cellulosic fibrous materials has been conceived and developed as a result of a plasma aided process of capillary impregnation. The dielectric barrier discharge surface pre-treatment modifies the chemical and capillary activity and improves such characteristics of the impregnation process as the penetration depth, speed of solution spreading and adsorption, and capacity of adsorbed solution. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) was applied to study the changed surface composition after plasma pre-treatment. The surface compositions of solid wood products, paper and board are critical to their end use performance. XPS is a powerful non-destructive surface analytical technique which provides valuable data on chemical surface composition and surface reorganization after plasma-chemical pre-treatment. The binding energy as a main characteristic of the atoms was used for elemental identification. Thermal analysis (TGA, DTA and DSC) was used to characterize the impact of the plasma surface activation on flame retardancy of Douglas fir wood. This study was developed as a part of large investigation on chemically activated wood surface and flame retarded wood.