Comfort Design Using Molded Seat Foam Techniques

In today's competitive automotive industry, manufacturers are asking their suppliers to meet customer needs. In the automotive seating business, these customer needs are appearance, feel and comfort, as well as the automotive manufacturer's demands for durability, reliability, performance at an affordable price. The challenges cause the limits of the traditional seat design to be expanded and the exploration of new frontiers in order to develop innovative seat products and processes.

Ikeda pushed the frontiers of innovation when it introduced its new molded automotive seat products last year. Creative development of the foam technique of Reaction Injection Molding (RIM) has yielded a new high volume seat system that combines the trim cover and foam pad into a single module in a one-step process. Eventually this module may add the seat frame for a single unit. This technique of module construction leads to comfort and cost savings desired in high volume seat production.

Product features for this new seating system are:

1. 1)
   efficient use of fabrics
2. 2)
   use of simple foam tooling designs
3. 3)
   comfort design capability in sub-layer process
4. 4)
   reduction of trim cover sew time
5. 5)
   consistent production quality