PU80 Low Density Polyurethane Foam Model Board

Unfortunately none of our tooling boards carry any Fire Retardancy or Fire Rating certification.

It's completely rigid. If it is 'hit' it will dent and stay dented. The way to think of this type of foam that helps people the most is that it's similar to (albeit higher density and therefore stronger) Oasis - the type of foam used for dried flower arranging. Therefore, although it would absorb impact from a shock, it would deform and stay deformed.

Our Pattern Coat Primer product is excellent for sealing foam and lower density modelboards. On lower density foams you might also choose to use a scrim of glass cloth to add some more strength to your pattern first. When using the Pattern Coat Primer, a typical thickness would be around 0.5mm.

No, it's expanded polystyrene foam (like styrofoam/blue foam) that you can cut with a hot-wire cutter. To cut PU foam you will need a blade of some description.

Polyurethane is a highly chemically inert material meaning that the vast majority of solvents and household chemicals will not dissolve the PU foam at all.

We are not aware of any easily available solvents or relatively safe to use chemicals that will dissolve the PU foam. If you did need a foam that is more readily dissolved then expanded polystyrene (EPS) such as Styrofoam might make a better choice.

Although perfectly possible to cut the Low Density Foam by water jet, it is more common to use other more simple manual methods. But for more precise applications, the foam works well with all CNC cutting and routing operations where the foam can be easily machined to a shape or pattern

The sheets are 100mm thick.

We would generally not recommend relying on flexing the board to release a cut shape. Although low density, the PU80 Tooling Board is still a rigid board with only a small amount of flex to it.

Unfortunately you cannot use this board with any epoxy based pre-pregs. This is because, during an elevated temperature cure, polyurethane based boards inhibit the cure of the epoxy resins and thus the pre-preg mould will never cure.

You'll see on the datasheet that we list a temperature range of -80 to 130'C although if you combine high temperature with high pressure then you would reduce this operating temperature range further and so I would say that 7 bar and 140'C would NOT be a suitable environment for the foam.

I should also point out if you're considering using this foam as a structural core in a prepreg laminate or as a pattern to take prepreg mould off that at elevated temperature polyurethane will severely inhibit the cure of epoxy-matrix prepregs and so you would need to make sure that the epoxy prepreg is not in direct contact with the polyurethane.

This model board can be very easily cut and shaped by CNC.

We would not recommend using a laser to cut modleboard due to the thickness of the board.