Development and Equipment of Open-cell Polymer Micro-foamed Material Preparation Technology

In the past decades, the preparation technology of polymer microporous materials has come a long way and many kinds of molding processes and methods have been developed that can produce microscopic pores in the polymer matrix, such as phase separation, stretching, Nuclear track method, sintering method, thermal decomposition method, etc., and the materials prepared by these methods have very important applications in many fields due to their special microstructures, including insulating and insulating materials, packaging materials, controlled release materials, Bone replacement materials, etc., have become important and important functional materials in many fields.

With the development of technology, higher requirements have been put on the molding technology of microporous materials, such as environmental friendly requirements, without using additives (substances) that may cause pollution to the environment and polymer matrix, and can be applied to most of the Polymer materials, the controllability of microstructures and the ability to achieve continuous production, etc. To meet these requirements, new polymer microporous material preparation techniques must be developed, and the use of microfoam technology to form polymer microporous materials can meet these requirements. Therefore, it has become a recent research hotspot.

In the early 1980s, Suh et al. of the American MIT Corporation first proposed the concept of microfoamed plastics and developed related molding techniques. The initial concept of the microfoaming concept was to introduce a large amount of polymer precursors into the polymer matrix. Pre-existing defect dimensions have smaller voids, which can increase the rigidity of the product while reducing the quality of the product, and do not significantly reduce the strength. The pore size of the micro-foamed material prepared by this process is generally less than 10 micrometers, and outstandingly, the cell density is very high, reaching 109 to 1015/cm3.

This project will focus on the feasibility of industrialized preparation of open-cell polymer microporous materials using micro-foaming molding technology through the analysis of the latest foreign technology trends, and on this basis will be the development of industrial equipment and molding process. We hope to cooperate with interested companies and jointly develop this advanced functional material preparation technology.