Yongrak Moon/Kyoung-soo Lee/Sung W. Cha
The Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology, vol. 23, no. 12, pp.3349-3356, 2009

Abstract : Bubble nucleation and growth are the key steps in polymer foam generation processes. The mechanical properties of foam polymers are closely related to the size of the bubbles created inside the material, and most existing analysis methods use a constant viscosity and surface tension to predict the size of the bubbles. Under actual situations, however, when the polymer contains gases, changes occur in the viscosity and surface tension that cause discrepancies between the estimated and observed bubble sizes. Therefore, we developed a theoretical framework to improve our bubble growth rate and size predictions, and experimentally verified our theoretical results using an injection molding machine modified to make microcellular foam products.

Keyword : Bubble Growth; Bubble growth rate; Injection molding; Microcellular foam products; Polymer foam