Extruded plastic foams are an essential component in lightweight construction and contribute significantly to energy savings due to their insulating properties. It is essential to determine relevant characteristics of plastic foams, such as bulk density and cell size, directly during the manufacturing process as part of quality control. With no currently available method to perform inline quality measurements, current industrial standards rely on taking samples during production and performing ex-situ quality control in the laboratory. This delay between sampling, quality assessment and corrective measures in the production processes can result in a significant decrease in product quality, delays in manufacturing, as well as additional costs in production and an additional ecological footprint in terms of carbon emissions.

The aim of the BayVFP project “TeraFoam” is to increase the resource and energy efficiency of the production of plastic foams by performing nondestructive, in-situ quality control using Terahertz Time-Domain Spectroscopy (THz-TDS). A dedicated THz-TDS measurement system will be integrated into a real production line and determine the bulk density and cell size of extruded plastic foams during the production process and detect any deviations from the target value. By providing immediate feedback to the production process, scrap can be reduced and the quality of the end products improved.

The goal of Menlo Systems in this project is to develop a novel THz-TDS system based on the ASOPS (Asynchronous Optical Sampling) technology, which will be specifically tailored for use in non-destructive testing in the extrusion of plastic foams.