Experiments and Models for Polymeric Microsphere Foams

The current project was performed under the direction of Dr. Byron Pipes as its lead investigator from January 2001 to August 2004. With the permission of the NASA, the project was transferred to Dr. Thein Kyu as the principle investigator for the period of September 2004 - June 2005. There were two major thrust areas in the original proposal; (1) experimental characterization and kinematics of foam structure formation and (2) determination of the mechanical, physical, and thermal properties, although these thrust areas were further sub- divided into 7 tasks. The present project has been directed primarily to elucidate kinematics of micro-foam formation (tasks 1 and 3) and to characterize micro-foam structures, since the control of the micro-structure of these foams is of paramount importance in determining their physical, mechanical and thermal properties. The first thrust area was accomplished in a timely manner; however, the second thrust area of foam properties (tasks 2,4-7) has yet to be completed because the area of kinematics of foam structure formation turned out to be extremely complex and thus consumed more time than what have been anticipated. As will be reported in what follows, the present studies have greatly enhances the in-depth understanding of mechanisms and kinematics of the micro-foam formation from solid powders. However, in order to implement all objectives of the second thrust areas regarding investigations of mechanical, physical, and thermal properties and establishment of the correlation of structure - properties of the foams, the project needs additional time and resources. The technical highlights of the accomplishment are summarized as follows. The present study represents a first approach to understanding the complexities that act together in the powder foaming process to achieve the successful inflation of polyimide microstructures. This type of study is novel as no prior work had dissected the fundamentals that govern the inflation process in this type of systems. The systematic approach to each of the different phenomena (i.e. morphological, diffusive, kinetic and dynamic) brings into context each of them in a way that allows separate understanding and analysis. Of the different phenomena studied, probably the one that gives a higher level of control over the inflation process has been shown to be the morphological aspects of the precursor particles. It is a major contribution of the present work to isolate and identify this phenomenon and highlight the features that with careful control during the synthesis of the precursor material can lead to a highly optimized and specialized final product (neat foam or microstructure). Some of these accomplishments have been presented in various national meetings and some of which are either published in refereed journals or still in various stages of publications. One of the presentations was selected for "Best of ANTEC 2004" Online Presentation Series of the Society of Plastics Engineers (SPE) (September 2004)