Stephane Costeux

Keynote: How Nanocellular Foams Challenge Our Understanding of Foam Science

Abstract: Over the past 40 years, incredible progress has been made toward designing and producing foams with controlled structure and tailored properties.  The science of foaming has progressed in parallel, to the point where the complex phenomena involved in foam nucleation, expansion and flow can be modeled by commercial design software.

The new frontier of development is nanocellular foams, which in the past few years has attracted a growing number of research groups, both from academia and industry. Nanocellular foams provide a unique challenge because at the nanoscale, materials behavior and phenomena like phase separation, gas diffusion sometimes produce results that classical foaming science cannot readily explain. We will review examples that test our understanding of the mechanisms involved in producing these new materials.

Biography: Dr. Stéphane Costeux is a Senior Research Laureate in DuPont, in the Water & Protection business. He started his career with The Dow Chemical Company in 2002 in Plastics R&D (Freeport, Texas), and transferred in 2006 to Dow Building Solutions R&D (Midland, Michigan), which became part of DuPont in 2018. Prior to joining Dow, he earned an engineering degree from ESPCI-Paris, a Ph.D. from Univ. Pierre & Marie Curie (Paris, France), and was a Chem. Eng. post-doctoral fellow at McGill University (Montreal, Canada).

He has worked on understanding and modeling structure-rheology properties of branched polyolefins, materials processing, new product and process development for building materials, incl. thermoplastic and thermoset insulation foams, and nanocellular materials.

He has been serving as Director on the board of the SPE Thermoplastic Materials & Foams division since 2014, first as Education chair and as chair of the FOAMS conference organization committee. He also chaired the New Technology Forum committee of ANTEC. He was elected SPE Fellow in 2016

He is on the Editorial board of J. Cellular Plastics and of Cellular Polymer, has authored 90 publications (incl. 30 patents applications) and received the Best Paper award at the SPE FOAMS conference in 2010, 2012 and 2013.