Abstract
Foamed plastics are a kind of composite materials consisted in air and resin. They have unique characteristics for heat transmission and electric conduction, impingement protection with materials reductions, light-weight, low-density and so on. Many foam processing technologies have already been developed using chemical and physical blowing agents and put into practical use. But these conventional foamed plastics have a serious problem, which the strength decreases extremely owing to voids as a defect. In order to correct this defect, a new processing
technology using supercritical fluid/gas as a blowing agent for foamed plastics, which is called to microcellular plastics, was developed in US. This process technology has also advantages over much conventional foam processing
because it uses environmentally sound gases such as carbon dioxide and nitrogen as blowing agents, rather than toxic chemical blowing agents. In this paper, the present situation of process technology of microcellular plastics is introduced.
