s Comfort Taking a Back Seat in Home Furnishings?

摘要

Upholstered home furnishings are an important application for flexible polyurethane slabstock foam, yet information onthe role of the foam in determining comfort performance is generally lacking. Such information would aid furnituredesigners in choosing the best type of foam for each application. This paper applies several different measurements to arange of slabstock foam grades, with the ultimate goal of developing information useful to furniture designers. In additionto the standard mechanical property measurements outlined in ASTM D3574, a pressure mapping method using a metalpressing plate representing a human seat form is described. While this method will not predict the contact pressuredistribution of a human subject on an actual piece of furniture, it provides a simple and reproducible means to compare therelative performance of different foam grades under realistic loads and deflections. Additional mechanical measurementssuch as shear modulus and an indentation-compression ratio are also considered. Finally, the merits of using a compositecushion, consisting of a layer of soft or viscoelastic foam on top of a harder support material are investigated. An studyusing human subjects will be a topic of future work.