Abstract: In order to study the smoke production performance of PVC materials and protective effect of different masks, a thermal decomposition and smoke production platform with protective testing function was built according to ISO/TS 19700 in this paper. PVC materials was used as smoke-producing materials. Five kinds of masks were selected as the protection and filter materials, which were gauze masks (12 layers, 20 layers), non-woven masks, nano masks, and electret masks. The smoke production performance of PVC material and the protective filtering effect of different masks on PVC pyrolysis smoke in wet and dry conditions were studied respectively. The result shows that, the main components of pyrolysis smoke from PVC materials are CO, CO2, HCl, CH4 and smoke particles. The microscopic features of the soot are mainly black fragments with a small amount of flocculent structure. The particle size of soot is 80～108 μm, and the main particle size range is between 90～98 μm.Wet or dry masks have a certain protective filtering effect on CO, HCl gas and soot particles in PVC pyrolysis smoke. The order of protection effect of wet or dry masks on CO and HCl gas is: electret mask > non-woven mask > nano mask > 20-layer gauze mask > 12-layer gauze mask. Compared with dry masks, wet masks can significantly improve the protection and filtration efficiency of HCl gas. Except for electret masks, the other wet masks can significantly improve the filtering effect of smoke particles, and the filtration efficiency of wet non-woven masks for smoke particles reached 92%.

Key words: PVC material, smoke production performance, dry or wet mask, protection and filter