Cellular Polyurethane

History and formulation

One calls urethane, or commonly "carbamate", any compound produced by the reaction of an isocyanate and an alcohol in accordance with the following reaction:

This reaction had been known for several decades when in 1937, Otto Bayer discovered how to make a plastic usable, free from polyisocyanate and polyol. Technologies of urethane were brought to the United States in 1953 by Jean-Pierre Abbat and Fritz Hartmann.

Polyurethanes can be manufactured with a large variety of textures and hardness's by varying the monomers used and by adding other substances.
They are used for the adhesives, paintings, elastomers ("rubber"), foams, fibres. Thus, these plastics with the vast applications are used in a great number of industries.
In the years 1970, the use of urethane for the wheels revolutionized the sports on casters (roller skate, board with casters).

Polyurethane material is characterised by outstanding characteristics, which make it interesting for a large range of applications:

• excellent mechanical wear resistance
• high rebound resilience, even in hard grades
• good tear propagation resistance
• low compression setgood stability against mineral oils, greases, gasoline and different solvents

Abrasion resistance

The most known property of PU is its abrasion resistance. According to standard tests, the abrasion resistance of polyurethanes is about two and a half to five times higher than for many rubber raw materials and about three to four times higher than that of soft PVC. The differences in the field are frequently even greater, since the excellent damping and impact resilience of polyurethane does not come into play with the standard test methods.

Low temperature flexibility

Polyurethane becomes increasingly harder with lower temperature, but in contrast to many other plastics, it does not become brittle. Thus the polyurethanes withstood the notched bar impact test even at -30°C without breaking. The long molecular chains (high molecular weights) of the raw materials give significantly better flexibility at low temperatures

Fire behaviour

(The following information does not apply to electrically conductive, antistatic and flame-resistant types.) Like all organic materials, polyurethane is combustible. The toxicity of the combustion gases and smoke density are usually measured according to DIN 53436. Judged on the basis of this leading international standard, the potential release of hazardous substances (acute inhalation toxicity) at 800°c is no worse than that of natural products such as wood, wool or leather.

Chemical resistance

General information concerning the chemical resistance of PU

Our PU range is composed of 2 principal types of polyurethane added with some types reserved for quite particular fields

• Erlan
• Vulkollan

The ERLAN quality is very interesting because it combines design features which can give excellent results in much applications as well as a report/ratio advantageous price quality.

The Vulkollan quality

Pure Vulkollan quality exclusively manufactured starting from the Desmodur D15? is reserved for applications requiring the highest possible performances (for e.g., thermal and dynamic stress, rebound…)

Special types of polyurethanes

For the solution of customized problems beyond that modified PU casting systems stand for order, for e.g.

• hydrolysis stability: polyether PU (water environments) Datasheet (118kB)

• microbe-resistant : polyether PU (FDA approved) Datasheet (123kB)

• Cellular PUR (89kB)