Wood-derived foam materials

Starting material for wood foam: wood fibers and water are ground to a suspension and foamed. Wood foam developed at Fraunhofer WKI consists of 100 percent renewable resources.

The wood is first ground with a high water content to fine particles until a fibre suspension is obtained. This suspension can be chemically or physically foamed using internal or external gas producers such as CO2. The foamed suspension is then hardened in a drying chamber. The strength of the foam caused by wood´s own bonding forces, so that no synthetic adhesives are necessary and any possible health risks due to emissions from adhesive are excluded. The result of the processing is a light base material with a porous, open cell structure and low bulk density. The material can be further processed as hard foam boards or as elastic foam and can be machined like wood materials, whereby it hardly comes to dust formation. Further the wood foam is odour-neutral.

Foams that are made of petrochemical based polymers.