SPE Foams® 2025

Tutorial Program

Purpose

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.

Benefits

Schedule

Sept. 30 – 8:00-12:00
Foam Fundamentals
Instructor:  Prof. Chul B. Park

1. Foam structures
2. Foaming agents
3. Fundamentals of foaming (cell nucleation and growth)
4. Extrusion foaming
5. Foam injection molding
6. Bead foaming

Sept. 30 – 13:00-17:00
Engineered Foams
Instructor: Prof. Ernesto Di Maio

1. Biofoams: processing and properties
2. Nanocomposite Foams: processing and properties
3. Foam morphology evolution and setting
4. Graded Foams

Oct. 1 – 8:00-12:00
Nanocellular Foams
Instructor: Dr. Stéphane Costeux

• Nanocellular foams: Challenges to achieve very high cell density
• Materials and processes
• Properties of nanofoams

About the Instructors

Prof. Chul B. Park received his PhD from MIT in 1993. He is Distinguished Professor of Microcellular Engineered Plastics at University of Toronto. He is also NSERC Senior Industrial Research Chair. He is the 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 is an accomplished scientist with international recognition in the field of plastic foaming as the author or co-author of over 1500 publications including 470 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 numerous journals. He has been organizing the Foam Symposiums at PPS. He also served on FOAMS TopCon 2006 and ANTEC® Thermoplastics Materials & Foams 2008 and 2009 as the Technical Program Chair. He was the Conference Chair for Biofoams 2009 & 2013 and PPS Americas Conference 2012.

Prof. Ernesto Di Maio received his PhD in Materials Engineering from University of Naples Federico II in 2003. He is Full Professor in the Department of Chemical, Materials and Production Engineering at University of Naples Federico II and Director of the foaming laboratory, foamlab, where new processing and characterization tools are developed to gain new understanding and develop novel foamed materials and products. Prof. Di Maio has authored more than 100 journal papers and more than 10 patents on foaming processes and products. He is Associate Editor of the Journal of Cellular Plastics, Member of the Editorial Board of Cellular Polymers, and of the Journal of Supercritical Fluids. He is member of the Board of Directors of the Thermoplastic Materials and Foam Division of the Society of Plastic Engineers, SPE. Prof. Di Maio has actively contributed to the organization of several International Conferences, including PPS, AIChE, SPE Foams, CellMat, Biofoams. He is recipient of the 2021 Lambla Award of the Polymer Processing Society.

Dr. Stéphane Costeux is a Senior R&D Fellow at DuPont in the Water and Protection business. He holds an engineering degree from ESPCI-Paris, a Ph.D. from Univ. Pierre & Marie Curie (Paris, France), and was a Chem. Eng. post-doctoral fellow at McGill University (Montreal). He then joined Dow Chemical in 2002 in Plastics R&D and moved to Dow Building Solutions in 2006, which became part of DuPont in 2018. His work relates to experimental and theoretical aspects in materials science, rheology and polymer processing, and to product and process development for new building materials, including thermoplastic and thermoset insulation foams. Dr. Costeux has authored over 100 publications (including 32 patents) and received the Best Paper award at the SPE FOAMS conference in 2010, 2012 and 2013. He was technical program chair of SPE FOAMS conferences in 2018 and 2021, and chaired SPE ANTEC®'s New Technology Forum. He currently serves as a Director and chair of the FOAMS Conference Committee on the board of the SPE Thermoplastic Materials & Foams division. He is also on the Editorial board of several journals, including J. Cellular Plastics, and Cellular Polymers. He was elected SPE Fellow in 2016.