Wright, H.C., Cameron, D.D. and Ryan, A.J. (2022) Rational design of a polyurethane foam. Polymers, 14 (23). 5111. ISSN 2073-4360
Abstract
Polyurethane (PU) foams are exceptionally versatile due to the nature of PU bond formation and the large variety of polymeric backbones and formulation components such as catalysts and surfactants. This versatility introduces a challenge, namely a near unlimited number of variables for formulating foams. In addition to this, PU foam development requires expert knowledge, not only in polyurethane chemistry but also in the art of evaluating the resulting foams. In this work, we demonstrate that a rational experimental design framework in conjunction with a design of experiments (DoE) approach reduces both the number of experiments required to understand the formulation space and reduces the need for tacit knowledge from a PU expert. We focus on an in-depth example where a catalyst and two surfactants of a known formulation are set as factors and foam physical properties are set as responses. An iterative DoE approach is used to generate a set of foams with substantially different cell morphology and hydrodynamic behaviour. We demonstrate that with 23 screening formulations and 16 final formulations, foam physical properties can be modelled from catalyst and surfactant loadings. This approach also allows for the exploration of relationships between the cell morphology of PU foam and its hydrodynamic behaviour.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2022 by the authors. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
Keywords: | polyurethane; foam; formulation; experimental design; DoE |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > Department of Chemistry (Sheffield) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number BIOTECHNOLOGY AND BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES RESEARCH COUNCIL BB/T010789/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 25 Nov 2022 12:02 |
Last Modified: | 25 Nov 2022 12:02 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | MDPI AG |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.3390/polym14235111 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:193771 |