Fire-retardant Composite Panel for Shipbuilding

Fiber-reinforced composite materials are rarely used in cruise or merchant ships for fire safety reasons. Saertex has now developed a fire-retardant standard panel and worked additionaly with the Meyer Group to incorporate the composite into a sandwich construction for the sun deck and exterior walls of a river cruise ship, achieving a 45 % weight saving.

The use of fiber-reinforced plastics (FRP) has been standard in boat building for many years. However, to date, these materials have scarcely been used in large ships such as cruise and merchant vessels, despite the numerous benefits using such composite materials would offer in terms of energy savings, fire safety, design freedom and maintenance. In a research and development project, Saertex, together with the Meyer Group, successfully replaced steel and aluminum in ship construction with composite materials. The entire sun deck and the exterior walls directly below it for the shipyard’s newly developed, 110-m river cruise ship were implemented using a sandwich construction that saves 45 % of weight in this case...