Automotive Interior Designs

Automotive Interior Designs With Closed Cell Foam

Solid foams form an important class of lightweight cellular engineering materials. These foams can be classified into two types based on their pore structure: open cell structured foams and closed cell foams.

Open cell structured foams contain pores that are connected to each other and form an interconnected network which is relatively soft. Open cell foam which will fill with whatever it is surrounded with. If filled with air this could be a relatively good insulator, but if the open cells fill with water, insulation properties would be reduced. Foam rubber is a type of open cell foam.

Closed cell foams do not have interconnected pores. Normally the closed cell foams have higher compressive strength due to their structures. However, closed cell foams are also generally denser, require more material, and consequentially are more expensive to produce. The closed cells can be filled with a specialized gas to provide improved insulation. The closed cell structure foams have higher dimensional stability, low moisture absorption coefficients and higher strength compared to open cell structured foams. All types of foam are widely used as core material in sandwich structured composite materials.

From the early 20th century, various types of specially manufactured solid foams came into use. The low density of these foams made them excellent as thermal insulators and flotation devices, and their lightness and compressibility made them ideal as packing materials and stuffings. A modern application of foam technology is aerogel, which is a closed-cell foam with very good insulatory properties, that is also very light. It is usually based on alumina, chromia and tin oxide, with carbon aerogels first developed in the late 1980s.

Automotive Interior Designs With Closed Cell Foam