Application
- Polymeric foams are materials made of two phases, a polymer matrix, and dispersed gas bubbles. They have low density, tunable mechanical properties, sound and heat insulation, and good energy absorption. Conventional methods for fabricating these foams include mold casting and chemical reactions, which limit the design to simple shapes.
- 3D printing, especially by light-activated processes, is an important technology for fabricating 3D structures, making it feasible to easily build complex and personalized objects with high precision with minimal material waste.
Our Innovation
This technology focuses on the digital fabrication of stretchable, compressible, and flexible polymeric foams with 3D printing technology, based on stereolithography processes. The polymeric foam is obtained by localized photopolymerization of water-in-oil emulsions in which water droplets are the pore-forming material, and the continuous phase is stretchable photocurable polyurethane.
Advantages
- The water-in-oil emulsions used are 3D printed by Digital Light Processing technology, resulting in porous stretchable soft complex structures at very high resolution.
- The printed objects possess three degrees of porosity, first, the intrinsic pores made by the water droplets, second, by the interconnectivity of the pores, and the third is by the cellular design geometry enabled by the 3D printing technology.
- The mechanical properties of the polymeric foams can be tailored by the material composition by various parameters, such as the water fraction within the emulsion and the resulting pore size, and the elastomer’s compositions.
- Functional materials can be easily embedded within both thee pores and the elastomer

Opportunity
- The resulting stretchable foams are highly reliable and versatile materials that can be applied in various fields, such as wearable personalized protective gears, impact resistance, thermal insulation, soft robotics, printed electronics, smart packaging etc.
- Furthermore, the new approach opens up exciting possibilities by implementing the emulsion method with other hyper-elastic materials to create novel foams with complex structures and tailored functionalities.