Flexible Polyurethane Foams
Are you satisfying with your office chair ? If so, there’s a very good chance that your office 
chair is upholstered with flexible foams made from Bayer MaterialScience raw materials. Or perhaps you’re not even at your desk; are you taking it easy on your sofa or in bed with your laptop? It doesn’t matter: even if you are in a train or plane on a business trip, you can be fairly certain that you are sitting on a foam from the huge family of polyurethane products. The main thing is that you’re not behind the wheel of your company car at the moment, rushing to your next meeting, while finding out all about the latest trends in the world of plastics on our website. While you might be sitting very comfortably on polyurethane in your car too, we would strongly urge you to keep your hands off your laptop while you’re driving.
“Whether at home, at work or in many areas of public life, flexible foams are used in a great number of everyday products. With a market share of around 25 percent, we are amongst the leading producers. So there is every likelihood that they are products made from raw materials from Bayer MaterialScience,” explains Dr. Sven Meyer Ahrens, Head of Development in the “Comfort” Segment of the Polyurethanes Division at Bayer MaterialScience. With an unerring eye and a deft touch, this foam expert can distinguish between the countless varieties of polyurethane, from “soft” to “rigid”, just as skillfully as Inuits can differentiate between the dozens of types of snow and ice found in their homeland at the North Pole. We are not exaggerating: in both cases, you can only tell the difference on the basis of the subtlest of variations at molecular or cellular level. “Nowadays, depending on market requirements, our polyurethane foams can have virtually any chemical composition, and serve a wide variety of purposes.” Meyer-Ahrens continues: “These range from thin and rather hard foams, used in products like camping stools, through extremely robust but no less comfortable modifications for office furniture, to flexible grades for upholstered furniture in the home.However, flexible polyurethane foams from Bayer MaterialScience aren’t just used as upholstery materials in the automotive and furniture industries. The newer areas of application of viscoelastic foams used in medical mattresses and, increasingly, in high-grade mattresses, or the use of special foams in technical and handicraft applications, for example in sanding blocks, painters’ rollers or speakers, are also increasingly becoming state of the art. This is amazing for a material that Otto Bayer only discovered by chance in 1937 as what was initially an unwanted side reaction in a polyurethane experiment. When water was added, there was simply no way of preventing the material from foaming. A fortuitous coincidence, as it later transpired. After all, didn’t