EMEROX~? Renewable and INFIGREEN~? Recycle Content Polyols: Effect of Substitution Rate on Molded Flexible Foam Properties

摘要

Sustainability, including rapidly renewable (bio-based) and recycle content, continues to be important to the consumer and is increasingly specified by OEMs. For flexible polyurethane foam systems sustainability is challenging as there are few recycle content polyol solutions available in the market and the majority of the available renewable content polyols are based on modified natural oils (NOPs, or natural oil polyols) that can be more difficult to engineer to a specific application than the petrochemical equivalent. Through its new Eco-Friendly Polyols platform, Emery Oleochemicals LLC recently introduced both EMEROX~? renewable and INFIGREEN~? recycle content polyols, providing the industry with customizable solutions that can be integrated economically into flexible foam applications where sustainability is desired. EMEROX~? polyols are produced from renewable dibasic acids that are a product of Emery Oleochemicals' proprietary ozonolysis technology. These polyols have all the design freedom of a petrochemical based polyol, but with what Emery Oleochemicals considers to be high renewable content. INFIGREEN~? polyols are unique aromatic polyether/ester polyols produced from scrap polyurethane foam. This paper explores the structure/property relationship of these sustainable polyols in typical TDI molded flexible foam formulations. The inclusion of these renewable or recycled content polyols can affect foam physical properties, sometimes in ways not fully anticipated by typical NOP or petrochemical polyols. Ladder studies were performed to understand the overall addition effect. One finding of this study was that foam firmness could increase with these renewable or recycle content polyols, depending on the grade and use level selected. As a second step, a case study was performed where the firmness of a recycle content containing foam was adjusted to match the petrochemical reference by reducing co-polymer polyol content and foam physical properties at equivalent density and firmness were compared.