LINE-X Protective Coatings announced that its PAXCON products have secured a safety initiative recommendation from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) for retrofitting government buildings, military bases and vehicles.
The USACE’s recommendation process was based on the superior performance of the PAXCON Protective Coatings during a series of blast mitigation experiments conducted at the Baker Engineering and Risk Consultants facility located close to San Antonio, Texas.
The tests were conducted to determine the ability of the walls coated with different protective coatings to withstand a specific blast load. The results will be utilized to design a computerized model to design retrofits of current government buildings across the world to fulfill better blast mitigation specifications.
Mike Bequette, who works at the USACE Protective Design Center, commented that PAXCON-coated walls demonstrated a greater degree of integrity and reduced the fragmentation of the masonry, which are important in improving occupant safety.
Bequette further stated that the resultant data will be utilized to design a model for general unreinforced, polymer retrofitted walls, which will be added in the upcoming release of the Protective Design Center’s Single-Degree of Freedom Blast Effects Design Spreadsheet (SBEDS v5.0) for developing retrofits for government structures in upcoming renovations.
Architects can easily choose the PAXCON product required from a drop-down list or can manually feed product-specific polymer characteristics into the SBEDS.
LINE-X Protective Coatings’ Vice President of International Operations and PAXCON, Steve Decker stated that the SBEDS program, which readily offers the required information, can make a positive impact on domestic and global facility security.