Tests of polyurethane foams with negative Poisson's ratio

Auxetic materials exhibit counterintuitive and interesting properties, which can be utilized to develop new families of products, which can meet sophisticated needs. Study presented within this paper is focused on manufacturing and testing auxetic polyurethane foams for potential introduction for seats in military helicopters. Firstly, a manufacturing process was developed which benefits from the well-known methods of processing conventional foams and allows preparing necessary test specimens for further tests. Secondly, a series of static and dynamic tests was performed during which the market available conventional foams used in transport are compared with processed auxetic foams.