Enlightenment from the 2025 Guizhou Dong Village Test: Low-Density Gray Silicon Base Panels Make the Millennium-Old Village "More Durable" and "More Fire-Resistant"!

         Guizhou, as a multi-ethnic settlement, is home to numerous ancient wooden architectural complexes such as Zhaoxing Dong Village and Xijiang Qianhu Miao Village. These buildings, with mortise and tenon joints as their framework and wood as their texture, carry the cultural genes of ethnic minorities. However, due to the flammable nature of wood, they are constantly threatened by fire risks. Historical data shows that ordinary wooden houses without flame-retardant treatment will completely burn down within minutes in a fire. Moreover, the unique contiguous architectural layout in Guizhou's mountainous areas will further exacerbate the risk of "a chain of fires spreading like a camp being set ablaze". A fire broke out in Zhaoxing Dong Village in 2014, destroying some wooden buildings, and this disaster remains a wake-up call in the hearts of ancient building protectors to this day. 

          Traditional protection methods often fall into a dilemma: simply using fire-retardant coatings may affect the air permeability of the wood, leading to structural decay; while adding firewalls and other renovation measures may damage the authenticity of ancient buildings. How to improve fire resistance without changing the architectural style? The emergence of low-density silica fume base boards provides a new possibility to get rid of this predicament. Its combustion performance reaches the A1 class non-combustible standard. In the test in Zhaoxing Dong Village, the wooden structure houses applying low-density silica fume base boards can effectively prevent the spread of fire while maintaining the integrity of the building's appearance. This "invisible protection" is exactly the solution most desired for the protection of traditional ancient buildings.

     In May 2025, during the fire-retardant testing activities for wooden houses carried out in Zhaoxing Dong Village, Guizhou Province, the low-density ash-silicon base board of Jiangxi Yuanyang Weili Industrial Co., Ltd. attracted much attention due to its excellent fire-resistant performance.

      This event was jointly organized by multiple local departments including the County Housing and Urban-Rural Development Bureau, the Bureau of Culture, Sports, Radio, Television and Tourism, the Market Supervision Bureau, the Emergency Management Bureau, and the Fire Rescue Brigade. It aimed to explore scientific approaches for fire safety and heritage protection in traditional contiguous wooden villages. The excellent performance of the company's products demonstrated in the tests provided reliable technical support for fire prevention and control in ancient villages. It not only verified the feasibility of a technology but also raised the era proposition of protecting ancient wooden buildings — in today's rapidly advancing technology, how to achieve harmonious coexistence between modern materials and traditional architecture? The application of this new type of building material offers an innovative and practical solution for the protection of ancient wooden structures in Guizhou.

      During the activity, the test buildings strictly adopted the same tree species, materials of the same age, and construction techniques as the existing residential buildings in Zhaoxing Dong Village to ensure that the test results could accurately reflect the fire resistance performance of the actual buildings. A total of 5 manufacturers and 7 test houses participated in this experiment, involving fire-retardant technologies such as transparent fire-retardant coatings, water-based flame retardants, and non-combustible fire-resistant building materials, with a control group set up in the test.
     
      At the test site, artificial ignition was used to set fire sources inside the buildings to simulate the spread of fire from inside the houses to those painted with fire-retardant coatings or flame retardants, so as to test the fire resistance status and duration of the burning houses. Professional equipment such as thermal imaging infrared cameras were set up on site to record data such as flame-retardant time and temperatures at different stages.

         The results of the comparative test are remarkable: the ordinary wooden house model without any flame-retardant treatment completely burned and collapsed within a few minutes after being exposed to fire; while the wooden structure house using low-density ash-silicon base panels successfully prevented the fire from spreading outward and maintained its structural integrity under the same test environment. This significant difference fully demonstrates the excellent fire resistance and flame-retardant effect of low-density ash-silicon base panels.