In this week's episode of Tale of the Tape, Matt Tempelis walks us through a few common open cell foams and their advantages.
Check out our last video to learn about the importance of compression deflection and compression set in foams like these!
Transcript:
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Tale of the Tape. I'm Matt Tempelis, President of Engineered Materials, and your Minister of Tape. Today, I'd like to talk about some of the most common open cell foams and their advantages. The uses of open cell foams are varied, and they have great air and water absorption and filtration capabilities, excellent thermal and acoustical insulative properties, as well as fast recovery and resilience. As you remember, we talked about open cell foams are interlocking porous openings that form a cell structure similar to the sponge you might find at your sink for cleaning. If we talk about low density polyurethane foams, they come in a variety of densities. Most common are anywhere from1 to 6 pounds (per cubic foot). 1 pound to 2 pounds (per cubic foot) are used a lot in Gasketing. 6 pounds (per cubic foot), up to 6 pounds: think about more like the mattress foams that you might use or a pillow foam. They come in ester and ether, which are two different types of polyurethane technologies, and they can be varied such that the pore openings can be very fine, or they can be up to a very wide opening. And we'll show you an example of that down the line here. Again, we mentioned air and water filtration is used a lot with the polyurethane foams. Great resilience thermal, acoustical, insulative properties. And generally, these foams are very cost competitive.
Here we have a common 2 pound (per cubic foot) UL polyurethane ester and a ten pores per inch filter foam. What does that ten pores per inch mean? Well, you'll be able to see right there. You literally have ten open cell pores per inch in this particular foam. You can see that it's a much finer pore density in the 2 pound (per cubic foot) polyurethane ester. High density microcellular polyurethane foam, better known from brands like Rogers Poron® or 3M ISOLOSS™, are excellent, very resilient products. Typically, you talk about 10 pounds per cubic foot of density and higher up to 20-25. Compression deflection ranges are quite broad, from 1 pounds per square inch all the way up to 50. So you have a very broad operating range that you can choose from in the category. They're very durable and tear resistant. They're very good insulators, and they absolutely are terrific at vibration isolation, shock absorption, and then again leveraging that resilience for gasketing.
Another common open cell foam: Silicone foam is best known for brands like Rogers Bisco® and Saint-Gobain's Norseal® are excellent products when you have that difficult project. Density ranges pounds per cubic foot from 10 to 27 typically. Very wide compression deflection ranges from 1.5 pounds per square inch to22 pounds per square inch. So very compressible to not so compressible, quite rigid. And constant use temperature, environmental resistance, chemical durability is why you use these products. Constant use temperature upwards of 400 degrees. They are still very resilient and have very low compression sets like the high density polyurethanes. And that flame resistance of these products is terrific, as well as very wide operating temperature range.
3M ISOLOSS™ LS-1050LM is a high density microcellular urethane. It is open cell even though it looks closed cell. Same with the Bisco® HT800 silicone foam. Again, looks like it is closed cell because you cannot see those pores. Microcellular. Absolutely. But these are open cell foams and you can tell by that great resilience. When you compress it, they both bounce back to the original shape immediately.
We've touched on a few of the most common open cell foam types in this episode and their advantages. Remember, we have a wide variety of these and other open cell foam types that we laminate pressure sensitive adhesives to and make parts to meet your specific application requirements. We'll see you next time on Tale of the Tape.
