(335ad) Modeling And Experimentation Of Polyol+Blowing Agent Systems

Polyurethane foams are made by reacting a di-isocyanate molecule with a polyol in the presence of blowing agent. Solubility of blowing agent in the polyol plays an important role on the foaming nature of polyurethane. Most of the blowing agents previously used to make polyurethane foams have been classified as ozone depleting by the Montreal protocol, which brought forward the need for new environment friendly blowing agents. Research is on going to determine a good model to describe Polyol + Blowing Agent system. The Sanchez-Lacombe EOS (SLEOS) has been used in the past to determine the solubility of small molecules (like blowing agents) in the polymers (Polyols), but unfortunately very limited experimental solubility data is available to evaluate the correlative ability of this EOS for these type of systems.

In this work, we compare predictions from the SLEOS for a variety of polyol+blowing agent mixtures and evaluate the predictive ability of this model versus experimental data obtained using a degassed vapor pressure apparatus.