Flexible foam is used in vehicle seat cushions, furniture, mattresses as insulating material, and for acoustic damping.
Hard foam is used for thermal and acoustic insulation, as a core material for composites, and also as a substrate material, for example in road construction.
First and foremost, flexible foam provides comfort. Its prominent characteristics are damping and insulation. Engineered foams made of PU are used in mattresses, for furniture and vehicle cushions, and in a wide variety of other applications requiring thermal and acoustic insulation. Additional applications that use flexible foam are filters, packaging, seals, and sponges. Other polymers such as PE are also used in these applications.
Indentation hardness
For molded foam such as vehicle cushions and mattresses, indentation hardness is one of the most important characteristic values used to describe the quality of the product, for example, its comfort.
Compression stress value
In this scenario, the deformation behavior of the specimen is relatively complex. Lateral movement of the cell structure with corresponding shearing occurs near the side cut surface, while the pure compression deformation is pre-dominate in the center. For this reason, it is not possible to effectively compare measured values that are determined from specimens of various dimensions using this test method.
Tensile properties
The specimens for these tests are normally taken from finished parts or a sheet. ZwickRoell offers sheet cutting presses with standardized blades. It is important that the blades are equipped with an ejector to avoid the risk of operator injury during specimen removal.
Fatigue Test
Fatigue tests determine the long-term behavior of foam under constant mechanical load. For example, it represents the load applied to a vehicle seat when a car is being driven.
The zwicki is designed for quasi-static loading with increasing, pulsating or cyclic tests through an electro-mechanical drive system. It is especially designed for mechanical testing applications with low loads. It is used for tensile, compression, and flexure tests.
Electromechanical servo testing actuators are universally applicable, suitable for tensile and compression applications and can be variably integrated into test fixtures. Applications range from materials and components testing to tests performed on end products.