Memory foam mattresses are in. It’s hard to go into a furniture store or sleep shop and not find somebody buying one, often at a premium price. Originally touted as a breakthrough based on space age technology, the emergence of memory foam continues to revolutionize the bedding industry as more health conscious consumers, especially first time young buyers, replace traditional mattresses with new age sleep solutions. The memory foam sector of the mattress industry is outpacing the market in terms of annual sales growth as more manufacturers add memory foam options to their portfolio.

The Perfect Fit

Behind this phenomenon is a fundamental fact: memory foam is different. It’s not your grandmother’s old fashioned mattress. Unlike standard mattresses which use innerspring back pressure to provide support, memory foam actually absorbs pressure and distributes it evenly across the body. Memory foam comes as close as possible to being the perfect fit. Like a soft glove that automatically reprograms itself to the shape of the human body, it adapts perfectly to even the slightest change in position and movement. No matter how light or heavy a person’s physical attributes are, anyone who lies on a memory foam mattress feels like it was “made for me”. To achieve this result, the mattress must be able to react equally to pressure change in any direction on an instantaneous basis; any significant delay in response will compromise the desired reaction.

Resiliency the Key The thing that makes memory foam work is resiliency, a characteristic that allows the material to adapt to even the slightest change in body position by proportionally redistributing pressure change across the entire body surface, unlike conventional innerspring designs which react to pressure only at the point of contact, offering different degrees of firmness. Resiliency means that shape and form change in direct proportion to applied pressure and return to their original state when the pressure is removed. (It literally remembers.) The mattress actually shapes itself to the contour of the body, depending on where pressure is applied. The mattress eliminates uneven and uncomfortable pressure points while keeping the spine in perfect alignment with the rest of the body. Furthermore, when body pressure is removed the foam immediately relaxes to its quiescent state (total absence of pressure). The net result—a revolution in mattress support that has endeared a substantial sector of the market to the biggest innovation in mattress technology since the introduction of the innerspring at the end of the 19th century. Memory foam is here to stay, as an innovation and as an alternative. Now for the rest of the story. Enter the new CPSC open flame resistance regulations and the unique challenge faced by memory foam manufacturers in order to comply with them.

Impact of FR Materials When the Consumer Product Safety Commission decided to implement the nation’s first open flame mattress fire safety regulations in July of 07, the move set off concern among the nation’s mattress manufacturers that the addition of flame retardant (FR) materials would compromise the structural integrity of their products. Flame retardant materials, which are designed to function as fire barriers, are installed throughout the entire mattress infrastructure so that all surfaces are protected. When the mattress comes into contact with flame, these materials either extinguish the flame totally or retard it to the point that its progress is significantly decreased, buying time for the occupants to leave the area safely. A typical innerspring mattress may require as many as three different barriers, added to all mattress surfaces in order to provide protection around the entire periphery of the mattress. Different mattress designs and styles require different weights and densities depending on mattress construction. Memory foam mattresses, on the other hand, can accommodate only a single piece of flame retardant material due to their unitized construction. While initial manufacturer concerns had focused on the unforeseen tactile and visual changes that FR materials might have caused, they proved to be unwarranted, in innerspring designs. Through extensive trial and error, many of the issues were resolved at least to where objections were minimized.

Memory Foam Issues Such concerns were not so easily dismissed in the case of memory foam designs, given the need for precise reaction. Since the mattress is constructed as a single unit, adding FR protection requires encapsulating the entire mattress in what amounts to a sock type of enclosure that literally envelopes the entire periphery and is then tightly fastened to keep it in place. This literally creates a second independent, freely-moving surface between the human body and the mattress.

This is precisely the problem that had to be overcome; when two materials are layered without any adhesive to hold them in place and pressure is applied to the surface, one of them is likely to slide against the other unless their movement is precisely synchronized. While the result would not be so important in a standard mattress, in a memory foam mattress it would be totally self defeating, since the reaction would adversely affect mattress response.

In order for FR material to avoid disrupting the performance of the mattress, the reaction of the FR material must be fully synchronized with the movement of the mattress itself, otherwise mattress performance will be less than responsive. The two must react as one.

Conventional fabrics are at a disadvantage when it comes to meeting this requirement, because they usually are either woven or knitted, and thereby unable to offer equal pressure response in all directions.

Celestia Stretch® Solution

To solve the problem, Freudenberg scientists developed a new engineered fabric using a propriety technology called Dynamic Body Contour Response™ which made it possible to meet flame retardant requirements without compromising the performance characteristics of memory foam mattresses.

The byproduct of this basic technology advance is an FR material called Celestia Stretch, an engineered fabric, constructed in such a way that allows equal pressure response in all directions. This characteristic, which is due to the fabric’s unique omni-directional fiber composition arrangement, combined with a stretch substrate material, allows the fire barrier to have the same pressure and resiliency as the mattress itself.

The omni directional fiber arrangement assures the uniformity of pressure response, while the stretch substrate assures that the material will relax to its original state when pressure is removed. This feature makes an important difference when it comes to tracking mattress movement.

According to Market Manager Ashutosh Karnik, Celestia Stretch is probably the most unique of Freudenberg’s long line of Celestia products, because its performance is based not only on flame suppression, but also upon the ability to simulate the actual movement of the mattress.

“To understand how Celestia Stretch works,” says Karnik, “think of two surfaces on top of each other. When one moves, in response to body pressure, the other must move with it. When there was only one surface to worry about, there was no problem. Add another layer, however, and it gets a little more complicated, because now you have two surfaces that have to move simultaneously.”

Celestia Stretch is one of several fabric designs in the popular Celestia line which allows mattress manufacturers an opportunity to match material performance parameters as closely as possible to the physical characteristics of the mattress itself, offering them a wide range of alternatives when it comes to optimizing FR functionality across a wide selection of mattress designs.