Foam Pillows

Firestop pillows are passive fire protection items, used for firestopping holes in wall or floor assemblies required to have a fire-resistance rating. The products must be used in accordance with the certification listing. more...

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General use

Where there are openings that require frequent access for reasons such as cable changes, the need to reseal them effectively through simple means has driven the development of the firestop pillow. The notion of re-enterability (a buzzword in the firestop field), the primary feature of firestop pillows, characterises an unquantified and undocumented measure for the ease with which changes can be made to a firestop.

Technical issues and common misconceptions

There are three types of firestop pillows:

rockwool batts with intumescent resin inside plastic bags;

vermiculite with intumescent graphite inside of fibreglass bags;

intumescent foam rubber;

A hose-stream test, which is mandatory for firestops in the US and often used in Canada, qualifies the openings and firestop pillow combinations as effective against the force of a 30 psi water stream. To accommodate larger openings that can allow the pillows to become dislodged, wire mesh is sometimes used although one vendor uses heavy-duty grids and claims it is "burglar-proof". Installing firestop pillows correctly is not as easy as one might think or be lead by the literature to believe. One may need to achieve a certain compression rate, which needs to be quantified for each hole. This would entail an accurate calculation of the area of the opening less the area covered by the penetrating items. Then one must factor in the required compression ratio of the pillows to calculate just how many need to be installed. Without this information, there is no evidence the installation conforms wiht the requirements of the certification listing. If the certification listing applicable to the opening does not mention the compression ratio, using pillows is inadvisable. It stands to reason that one must compress the pillows adequately in order to pass the test.

In order to result in an installation which meets listing and approval use and compliance is ensuring pillow coverage between cables. If there is no requirement to install the pillows between the cables, this means that it is imperative that the cables used in the installation match those used for testing, which is unlikely under field conditions. It is also a physical impossibility to prevent smoke migration through the interior of a cable bundle, if the bundle is not opened up and sealed on the inside during the installation of any firestop, regardless of whether the firestop is intumescent or not. No intumescent can be expected to spread between multiple layers of cables, from the outside towards the inside. If viewed in plan view, each cable represents a circle. In a bundle, as cables are in contact, there are necessarily empty spaces between cables, which invite smoke and heat transfer. An intumescent firestop may reach somewhat into the first layer of cables but to push beyond this takes more force than can be reasonably expected to be generated through an intumescing process. Theoretically, after one calculates the compression rate to determine just how many pillows should be installed, then one has to install the mesh, or grating, or grid, then the pillows. When one uses the mesh, mechanical fasteners are required, including, anchors, bolts etc. In many cases, the effort required negates the touted and perceived benefits of fast installation and "re-enterability" that is typically purported to be provided by this technology.

Read more at Wikipedia.org