New Cold Foam System for Automotive Seating with Low Mold Temperature

In general, mold temperature is a significant factor for foam skin in producing flexible polyurethane (PU) foam. We divided flexible PU into two large categories, hot cure system and cold cure system, and used mold temperature is 30 – 50 °C in hot cure system, 50 – 70 °C in cold cure system. Recently, the requirement for flexible PU foam in low density has been getting important in Korea, because of the trends in structure such as thinner design for light vehicle, production cost saving and so on. For application of low density system, we must use the more blowing agent than used in high density system, the higher mold temperature needed for producing flexible PU foam without skin defects, and the more energy to maintain the mold temperature. While improving of flexible PU foam in skin defect for lower mold temperature system, however we recognize that the effort is insufficient in Korea. In this paper, we introduced the Korea Polyol’s low mold temperature system (KPC’s LMT system). KPC’s LMT system can be applied in lower (40 – 45 °C ) mold temperature without skin defects and reduce the production cost.