Mechanical and transport properties of polymeric foams derived from 3D images

We demonstrate a 3D imaging technique and the ability to calculate thermal conductance and elastic properties of a number of industrial cellular foam polymers. We compare our numerical data to commonly used theoretical and empirical property-porosity relationships. For conductivity we find that the numerical results agree extremely well with an empirical expression based on experimental data of various foams. The upper Hashin-Shtrikman bound also provides an excellent prediction of the data across all densities.