Styrofoam

Styrofoam is a budget friendly modeling board. The main difrance between this material and Polyurethane board is the chemically consistency. Styrofoam is based on expanded polystyrene foam. This material is quit often used as an insulation material for roofs and floors.

Properties:

Styrofoam comes in various densities.
The colour of the material is blue or black.
This material is suitable for molding, but be aware the surface finish is quite course. Vacuum forming is not possible.
As it is budget friendly alternative option to polyunsaturate foams, this material is suitable for large objects.
The material is easy to shape by hand. The blog of David Neat has some great tutorials on how to work with this matirial https://davidneat.wordpress.com/styrofoam/
Make sure to use non solvent glues and paints with this material, as the chemicals will melt the material.

Characteristics & Uses:

Excellent machining Characteristics
Easy to carve by hand

Material Handling:

Toxic gas released by high machining speed.
work in a well ventilated area when sanding styrofoam
can cause eye irritation
splinters and cause irritation to the skin

Protective Equipment

wear gloves
wear a dust mask
wear closely fitted eye protection

SUSTAINABILITY

Styrofoam is recyclable, if you are willing to bring your waste to a polystyrene processing company. Styrofoam it's not bio-degradable.Styrofoam is an oil based product.

Internal RCA project/staff development

As part of the robotic arm training, Kevin Koekkoek from the CNC team has made a drawing inspired on a Barbara Hepthwoth sculpture, to be machined on the robot arm. This was the first job run on the robotic arm.

The choice of Styrofoam was perfect for this training session, as the model was cut on the machine within 15 minutes.As the material is also quite soft, any errors in the CNC tool path would not be fatal.

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