Airbag housing made invisible with Bayfill foam system

Well-heeled Mercedes Benz owners can now drive around in even greater comfort, style and safety thanks to Bayer MaterialScience AG’s Bayfill foam system for instrument panels, which is helping the automaker comply with ever stricter vehicle interior safety standards without relaxing its high aesthetic standards.

Made from a mix of Bayer’s polyurethane (PU) raw materials Bayfill and Desmodur , the foam system was selected by Mercedes Benz for use in the instrument panel of its Class A vehicles.

Sandwiched between a decorative skin and a carrier, the foam provides a higher quality ‘elongation break’ — the perforation from which a vehicle’s airbag comes out — than previous materials, preventing fragments of the dashboard from spraying a car’s interior when the airbag deploys.

Plus, the thermal foam is stable enough to prevent the elongation break from being visible on the decorative layer, allowing Mercedes Benz to achieve the lush, polished looked valued by its drivers.

Additionally, the materials’ quick-hardening qualities mean that molded parts can be produced more economically than ever before. Whereas previous generations of filling foams had taken up to 180 seconds to harden, the Bayfill system enables demold times of approximately one minute, according to Bayer MaterialScience, which can considerably shorten production cycles.

Bayer Inc. — Division of Bayer AG (Toronto, Ont.);

www.bayer.ca; 866-770-1102