Seat upgrades

[rdorman]

Just passing along what the industry experts are saying!

Temper is NOT to soft for automotive use. Just as an FYI for everyone tempur is just a brand name for viscoelastic foam. Comes under many names.

The Tempur that is used for beds and pillows is very soft because it does not have to support the amount of weight, for a given area, that a seat cushion in a car does.

You can absolutely put Tempur pillows, etc in your seat over the other foam and realize a benefit. It WILL feel better.

BUT, some of the folks I have seen do it with the pillows and matresses toppers have ended up with a 9" thick seat cushion! To thick for my tastes.

This stuff is rated at how many pounds it takes to compress 50 sq inches 25%. That is an 8" circle. Obviously, the more you compress it the more you weight it takes. So you can take a soft peice of greater thickness and no bottom out. The amount of weight required to compress the foam is fairly linear when it comes to viscoeleastic foam.

I will give you a example. Confor CF40 (viscoelastic) with an IFD about twice that of the typical pillow or matress cover takes about .3 psi to compress 25%. By the time you get to 70% that is now 1.5 psi. An increase of five fold! So to compress this foam 70% you would have to put 150 pounds in a 8" round area. I would imagine that be about a 400 pound guy! Above just below 80% deflection (compression) the scale becomes vertical and the foam basically becomes non compressable.

Using a little math you can see that you could use any degree of softness foam in a seat and yeild acceptable results. But it is not what is recomended from the industry.

Lets work it. Lets say the old a$$ cheaks have most of the weight on two 8" circles and that the weight is 150 pounds. Lets use a 6" slab of pillow type viscoelastic (such as one person did) and give it a IFD of 15, a good but firm pillow number. That piece for our two circles will support 30 pounds at 25% deflection or a compression of 1.5". Of course, the more you sink into it the more the circle grows! This is only 1/5 of the weight that we are applying. From the previous example you can see that it would take a 70% deflection to increase the IFD five fold. So our 6" hypothetical pad is now 1.8" thick. Still not bottomed out! However, we are now in the point of the depression curve where the product is rapidly becoming 'solid', non compressable. In effect, bottoming out. On bumps in the road and such.

Again, this is all based on industry information and not personal experience which is why I started this thread!

So as you can see, you can use viscoelastic foam in darn near any firmness and you will see a benefit!

Rick