hyper elastic foam

[phoenix]

Hi CapeCodKayaker,

Welcome to the Mattress Forum!

All your information has been a big help as I have been struggling for days trying to select mattresses for an adjustable bed frame that we will be buying very soon.

I’m happy the information here has been helpful to you.

So many ads combine memory foam mattresses with the frames but I am now leaning more towards latex.

An all-latex mattress can be a good choice for use in combination with an adjustable bed base, as it puts up with the demands of bending and specific weight concentrations that are common with adjustable beds.

One of your member retailers has a nice mattress that uses hyper-elastic foam. I haven’t seen that in your tutorials and wonder if it is another type of memory foam?

“Hyper-elastic” is an actual term used to describe products and foam that can put up with larger strains and deformations. The foam is also more immediate in its response and is also tends to be extremely durable. This is sometimes used to describe some of the newer generation of high performance polyfoams. Some of these polyfoams are engineered to provide feels that are somewhat similar to latex, others similar to memory foam, and others simply versions unto themselves. TitanFlex may be one of these high performance polyfoams you’ve seen mentioned on the site described as hyper elastic.

If you want to delve into “rabbit hole” of testing polyfoams and the attempt to quantify the hyper elastic nature of this material, you can read more about the Ogden material model here, or these tow studies (here and here) that attempt to apply and modify this model to polyfoams.

Do the USA made memory foam mattresses have an odor like the ones from China?

The amount of odor with any memory foam will vary by such things as the chemical composition and state of cure before the foam was shipped or assembled within the mattress, the humidity in the factory when the foam was poured, as well as if the foam was compressed and sealed for shipment and how long (if at all) it was kept in this state and allowed to have the odor dissipate before being placed within a mattress. The amount of odor can vary by formulation, manufacturer and country of origin, with wide variations found within each category. Foams compressed and sealed for longer periods of time, such as when shipping in containers over long distances, can have stronger initial odors as they may not have been allowed to “breathe” much before be assembled within a mattress.

My husband has a very strong sense of smell and feel that would not be good for him. Do the latex mattresses have an odor problem?

Many people are sensitive to polyfoam and specifically memory foam (I once had a reaction to a memory foam topper, even though I don’t have Multiple Chemical Sensitivities (MCS)). If you are very sensitive to odors, as some people are with Multiple Chemical Sensitivities (MCS), any odor, even one that isn’t harmful, can be unpleasant. Latex odor is described by most people as “semi-sweet” or “vanilla-like”, and it tends to dissipate quite quickly in a new mattress.

Also, are the latex mattresses easier to get out of than the memory foam ones?

While all of the layers of a mattress will contribute overall to the ease of repositioning, latex is more resilient and returns more energy than memory foam, and most people would agree that a mattress using primarily latex in the upper comfort layers will be easier to “get out of” than one using mostly memory foam in the upper comfort layers.

Phoenix