The Study of Enteromorpha-Based Reinforcing-Type Flame Retardant on Flame Retardancy and Smoke Suppression of EPDM

Enteromorpha, as a waste from marine pollution, brings great pressure to environmental governance every year, especially for China. Under the premise of a shortage of industrial materials, taking appropriate measures can turn waste into wealth, which will benefit us a lot. In this work, a bio-based reinforcing-type flame retardant based on Enteromorpha is designed. The designed Enteromorpha-based flame retardant system (AEG) mainly focuses on the reinforcing and flame retardant effects on ethylene-propylene-diene tripolymer (EPDM). For the AEG system, ammonium polyphosphate (APP) serves as both the acid source and the gas source; the simple hybrid material (GN) produced by loading graphene (GE) and Enteromorpha (EN) using tannic acid (TA) as a regulator serves as an acid source and a carbonizing source. The results show that when 40 phr AEG is added, the LOI of EPDM/AEG40 reaches 32.5% and the UL-94 reaches the V-0 level. The PHRR and THR values of EPDM/AEG40 are 325.9 kW/m² and 117.6 MJ/m², respectively, with decrements of 67.3% and 29.7%, respectively, compared with the results of neat EPDM composite. Especially, the TSP and TSR values of EPDM/AEG40 are reduced from 15.2 m² of neat EPDM to 9.9 m² with a decrement of 34.9% and reduced from 1715.2 m²/m² of neat EPDM to 1124.5 m²/m² with a decrement of 34.4%, indicating that AEG is effective in flame retardancy and smoke suppression. Meanwhile, the tensile strength and tear strength of EPDM/AEG composites are much higher than neat EPDM, therefore, with the future development of innovate reinforcing-type flame-retardant Enteromorpha, the application of Enteromorpha in the polymer flame-retardant field will surely usher in bright development.