NMR microscopy of polyurethane foams

NMR microimaging has been applied to the characterization of foam materials, in order to understand their properties and gain deeper insight into their structures. The structure of "open cell" foams can be visualized with sufficient resolution to obtain the size and shape of cells, as well as their spatial distribution within specimens. Statistics of cell sizes have been calculated from NMR microscopy and are in good agreement with results obtained from electron microscopy. We demonstrate that the local density of foams, which are parameters largely inaccessible by other analytical methods, readily can be determined by NMR microscopy.