Lightweight Plasterboard with Engineered Pore Architecture
Defines a surfactant pair whose differing interfacial elasticities engineer a controlled, partially-collapsing foam in the set core.
- Assignee
- Saint-Gobain Placo
- Jurisdiction
- European Patent Office
- Filed
- 2008-02-13
- Published
- 2009-08-19
- Status
- Granted
Two foaming surfactants are co-injected at the foam generator. One produces a stable, narrow bubble-size population that survives setting. The other produces an unstable population that partially drains and collapses on a timescale tied to the dihydrate hydration curve, producing a final core with both closed micro-voids and larger interconnected channels.
Most plants instrument only delivered foam density (g/L). The patent's effect lives in the bubble-size distribution — a parameter that almost no production line measures in real time. A plant attempting to compete blindly will read the chemistry and miss the architecture.
- Claim 1
Ratio of stable to unstable surfactant in the delivered foam, expressed as a delivered air-volume fraction range.
- Claim 2
Collapse timescale of the unstable foam population tied to the initial set time of the slurry.
- Claim 3
Resulting core density below a defined threshold while maintaining a minimum facing-paper bond strength.
Independent measurement of bubble-size distribution at the generator output, mixer outlet, and forming-station headbox is the diagnostic toolkit needed to compete in this space. We supply our customers a 250 mL calibrated cylinder method and a free benchtop image-analysis script — request the Foam Stability Index kit.
- · European Patent Register, EP 2 090 559 B1
- · Saint-Gobain Placo product technical data sheets