Nowadays most of the automotive manufacturers accelerate their developments for sustainable products such as hybrid car, from the viewpoints of environmental-friendly. This trend is now extending to all automotive parts. The flexible polyurethane foam, which is used as the material for a car seat, is an example. Development trend is going into weight reduction, recyclability, carbon neutral and so on. In our recent investigation, new seat cushion technologies, which achieved riding comfort, weight reduction by thin foam design, good productivity and good working conditions, were accomplished by new MDI base isocyanate. This time, we tried to displace raw materials based on petrochemicals (PPGs) by the natural ingredients along with this new MDI technology. In this study, our investigation clarified following issues. 1. The natural ingredient that suits to our new MDI base systems. 2. Influences of the introduction method and the introduction quantity of the natural ingredients to the foaming process and seat cushion performances. Since most natural ingredients have only less affinity with general PPGs, it is difficult to retain good liquid stability for polyol premixes. It is well known that the issue is dissolved by chemical modification of the natural ingredients. On the other hand, the modification exhausts not a little resource and the chemicals used for the modification dilute the natural ingredients concentration in the foam products. Thus the examination was pursued without high modification of the ingredients. The results of these examinations were as following. 1. The liquid stability and other properties of polyol premix and isocyanate were controlled well as general raw materials of the flexible foam. 2. The new environment-friendly seat cushion system was established in this study that included at least 20% of the natural ingredient, maintaining very good physical properties and molding-ability. In addition, other merits and demerits generated by using natural ingredients were discussed in this paper.
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