Use of propylene oxide polyol as cell opening agent in flexible polyurethane foam

Abstract

In this work, modification of cell opening agent in automotive seating and furniture flexible polyurethane (FPUR) foam formulations was studied. The role of cell opening agent is to increase the open cell content and prevents the foam shrinkage after completely cured. Nowadays, conventional cell opening agents employed is polyether polyol which has high ethylene oxide content. The disadvantages of conventional cell opening agent are high cost and phase separation due to its high polarity and hydrophilic property of ethylene oxide unit which is able to form hydrogen bond with water molecules and causes layer separation from polyol in the foam formulation upon storage. In this work, pure propylene oxide (PO) polyol was used as a new cell opening agent in FPUR foam formulations. The advantages of PO polyol are low cost and PO polyol has low polarity. Mechanical properties of FPUR foams prepared from PO polyol, namely hardness, elongation, tensile and tear strength, were studied and compared with FPUR foams prepared from conventional cell opening agent. It was found that FPUR foams of both automotive seating and furniture formulations which were prepared from PO polyol gave good mechanical properties. For the amount of open cell content in comparison to FPUR foams prepared from conventional cell opening agent, automotive seating FPUR foam formulation prepared from PO polyol gave the same amount of open cell content while furniture FPUR foam formulation prepared using PO polyol had less open cell content.