Flexible cantilever chair using DuPont materials goes on show in London
A furniture designer has turned to Dupont’s PBT ‘Crastin’ and TPC ‘Hytrel’ to create a cantilevered chair for a show at the Royal College of Art.
Frederic Rätsch started his project ‘Flexible Seating in Public Spaces’ in October 2016, as his graduation project in Design Products at the Royal College of Art in London. He intended to make the first flexible cantilever chair with benefits in sitting and stacking.
To do this he needed strong and tough DuPont Crastin PBT for structural firmness, and the flexibility of thermoplastic elastomer Hytrel for enhanced softness and pleasant tactility of the surface.
Andreas Zöller, DuPont Marketing Leader, said: “It has been a fantastic journey to bring our world-class application development capabilities to this project. Bringing deep understanding of material properties, functional and aesthetic design concepts on one table has been energising and enabled us to push the limits in our minds.”
The chair is intended for cafés, restaurants, canteens, museums, libraries, universities and other public spaces. It is designed with the research of the context, material, design history and sitting behaviour in mind. In Rätsch’s characterised his chair by giving the ability to put it on a table for floor clean up, the needs for agile seating, the materials used and outdoor performance.
The use of high performance plastics gives the chair a comfortable elastic seat, made of Hytrel that allows adaption to the body. It is visually totally flat and solid, but when sat upon is soft and flexible. The Crastin PBT with its strength is an adequate material to support the seat shell, while still allowing some flex. The design process was driven by a constant exchange between the computer and full-scale model making. CAD models are used as a tool to record the process and test stackability and chair use.
The Institute of Plastic Processing at RWTH-Aachen University, Germany, made a full-scale prototype on its large 3D printer, using Hytrel for the seat shell to showcase the intended flexibility. Nicolai Lammert of the Institute said: “The IKV is happy to have successfully contributed with its knowledge and large 3D printing assets in fused filament fabrication (FFF). Using that promising technology, the making of a full-size 3D printed chair has been a challenge, due to its size, the use of DuPont’s new engineering filaments and the time constraints. There was no room for production repetition, but these new filaments revealed to be low warpage and easy in the printing process.”
‘Flexible Seating in Public Spaces’ runs at the Royal College of Art Graduation Show to July 2nd, in Kensington, London. Entry is free, for details phone 020 7590 4352.