Structural Characterization and Mechanical Behaviour of LDPE Structural Foams. A Comparison with Conventional Foams

Structural foams are composed of two solid layers enclosing a foamed core. The application of sandwich structural foams has rapidly increased in the last decade. Injection moulding is currently used to produce these foams, being not common to produce conventional foams of similar densities and chemical compositions in a similar process. In this paper an alternative route to produce structural foams has been used. This method allows fabricating conventional foams with the same chemical composition and density than the structural foams, so comparisons between properties of both kinds of materials can be made in a proper way, i.e. avoiding effects of different chemical compositions and/or different densities. The structural and mechanical properties in tension, compression and bending have been characterized both for structural and conventional foams based on a low density polyethylene. The results have showed that the sandwich structure of structural foams improves a 50% the mechanical behaviour in bending, however no improvements in compression or tension have been found.