In this week's episode of Tale of the Tape, Matt Tempelis walks us through a demo on the resilience of open and closed cell foams.
Check out our last video to learn about the key differences between open and closed cell foams!
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 we have an exciting demo episode. We talked about last time the difference between open cell and closed cell foams. Today, we're going to show you one of the differences through a demonstration. So we have a couple of different open cell foams, just like we did in the last episode. We have a 2lb polyurethane ester that is UL rated. That's an open cell foam, low density product. A lot of water and moisture can go through it. We expect it to be quite resilient. We also have the 3M™️ ISOLOSS™️ product. LS-1050LM very similar to some of the Poron™️ products, a little softer density product in the 3M range again purported for its resilience. And then lastly, we have the Armacell's Armaflex™️ product, which is a closed cell vinyl nitrile product. We've put all of these products under a great pressure with a couple of washers as well as some shop clamps. They've been clamped for over an hour. So we're going to see kind of how these things do when we take them off that kind of pressure and see how fast they bounce back. So let's go to the demo. So we're going to take these washers that are clamped down off one at a time to kind of see the resilience that we get on each of these.
This is the polyurethane ester that we're taking off. You can see some compression, but it is bouncing back relatively quickly, as we would expect. This is the 3M LS-1050LM ISOLOSS™️ product. We're going to take that clamped material off and see what that looks like. Boy, that's quickly coming back to its original form. It looks really good and is resilient as purported. And then lastly, we're just taking this off of the Armaflex™️ vinyl nitrile product, a closed cell material, whereas the other two are open cell. And boy, we see the indentation of those washers. We see some compression set as we'd expect. So if we take a look at the thickness here of the polyurethane ester, rebounding quite well to its original shape, we'd expect that to happen over time relatively quickly. That 3M ISOLOSS™️ looks like it was never under compression. High density urethane is amazing in terms of that resilience as you can see. And 3M's ISOLOSS™️ is a very, very high quality product that way. And then lastly, the closed cell foam. We'd expect all closed cell foam to have a level of compression set that's quite a bit higher than their open cell cousins.
We look it looks like this Armaflex™️ is going to be no different here, as you can still see that washer indentation there. So what have we learned? We obviously have just proven and shown that those open cell products are super resilient, that high density urethane is something else and very impressive. And then lastly, a closed cell product, you are going to see that set. That is a good thing, right? Because it allows you to get that positive seal, get that compression and really squeeze down and make sure that you've got that no air or water getting through that positive seal. At the same time, if you're looking for resilience and you can use an open cell foam, that would be the way to go. Who wasn't excited about that demonstration of resilience and the difference in compression set between open cell and closed cell foam tapes? I thought it was a terrific demonstration. I thought it was exciting and informative and gives you some idea of how these different materials act differently. It's really important to get a material expert involved right away to help you design the right product for your application. Remember, at Engineered Materials, we provide parts that make your company better. We'll see you next time on Tale of the Tape.
