Purpose & Review

This tutorial will provide practical information that will help you enhance your technical capability in foaming. It will help you develop new blowing agents to meet the growing challenges, design foam products that meet customer’s needs, improve effectiveness of your foam R&D and processing projects. The attendee will also receive updated key references on plastic foams. 

Tutorial Outline

Sept  12 - Prof. Chul B. Park

1.   Design of Foam Structures

2. Foaming Agents
3. Fundamentals of Continuous Microcellular Foaming
4. Control of Cell Nucleation
5. Control of Foam Density

Sept  12 - Prof. Hani E. Naguib

6. Biofoams: processing, properties, and applications
7. Nanocomposite Foams: processing, properties, and applications
8. Sustainable Foams: processing, properties, and applications

Sept  13 – Dr Stephane Costeux

9. Foam Fundamentals: Nucleation, Growth and Stabilization
10. Application to Nanocellular Foams

Who should attend? 

This tutorial is intended for a range of companies and individuals involved in thermoplastic foam development, production, and applications:  R&D scientists and engineers, formulation scientists, process engineers, quality engineers and application engineers from thermoplastic foam production and manufacturing companies. Chemists and chemical engineers involved in development of foaming grade resins and blowing agents. Foaming equipment manufacturing: design engineers, project engineers, and rheology specialists. Development engineers and research scientists working on new foam developments. Foam users and application specialists.

When and Where

Tutorial starts 9:00 AM Monday, September 12 and ends 12:00 PM Tuesday, September 13, 2016

 About the instructors

Dr. Chul B. Park received his PhD from MIT in 1993. He is Distinguished Professor of Microcellular Engineered Plastics at University of Toronto.  He is the Founder and Director of the Microcellular Plastics Manufacturing Laboratory, which enjoys the reputation of being one of the pioneering research institutions in refining various foaming technologies.  He has also established the Centre for Industrial Application of Microcellular Plastics with $10M pilot-scale and industry-scale equipment in refining various foaming technologies.  He is an accomplished scientist with international recognition in the field of plastic foaming as the author or co-author of over 900 publications including 265 journal papers.  He is also active in professional activities. He is Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Cellular Plastics and serves as an advisory editorial board member of a few journals. He has been organizing the Foam Symposiums at PPS. He also served on FOAMS TopCon 2006 and ANTEC TPM&F 2008 and 2009 as the Technical Program Chair. He was the Conference Chair for Biofoams 2009 &2013 and PPS Americas Conference 2012.

Dr. Hani Naguib is a Professor at the University of Toronto and holder of a Canada Research Chair in Smart and Functional Materials. His major expertise is in the area of multifunctional and adaptive polymer and foams including active polymers; sustainable polymers; biopolymers; nanocomposites and hybrids. He has many refereed publications, scholarly addresses, and seminars to date in the field. Hani is the recipient of numerous honours and awards such as the Canada Research Chair, the Premier’s Early Research Award of Ontario, and the Canada Foundation of Innovation. He is a Professional Engineer in Canada, a Chartered Engineer in the United Kingdom, a Fellow of the Institute of Materials Minerals and Mining IOM3 in United Kingdom and Fellow of the Canadian Society of Mechanical Engineers, with other professional engineering affiliations. Hani procured his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Toronto in 2001.

Dr. Stéphane Costeux is a R&D Fellow with The Dow Chemical Company. He joined Dow in 2002 and transferred to Dow Building & Construction business R&D in 2006. His current work relates to experimental and theoretical aspects in polymer science, rheology and materials processing, product and process development for building materials, incl. thermoplastic and thermoset insulation foams.

Prior to joining Dow, he earned an engineering degree from ESPCI-ParisTech, a Ph.D. from University P. & M. Curie (Paris, France), and was a Chem. Eng. post-doctoral fellow at McGill University (Montreal) for 2 years.

He has authored 70 publications (incl. 27 patents applications). He received the Best Paper award at the SPE FOAMS conference in 2010, 2012 and 2013. He currently serves as a Director and FOAMS Conference Committee chair on the board of the SPE Thermoplastic Materials & Foams division, as co-chair of the New Technology Forum committee of ANTEC and on the Editorial board of J. Cellular Plastics.