The Pre-expansion phase of manufacturing is simply the swelling of the small bead to almost 50 times its original size through heating and rapid release of the gas from the bead during its glass transition phase.

After the expanded beads have been dried they are blown into large open storage bags for the aging process. The beads have been under a dynamic physical transformation that has left them with an internal vacuum in the millions of cells created.

After the aging is finished, the beads are then ready for molding into blocks.Since this is a confined enviroments, the only way teh beads can expand is to fill uo any voids between them causing the soft surfaces to fuse together into a polyhedral type solid structure.

According to the author, so far shape moulding machines have been described best by Jo-
hann Friedrich Jegelka during the talk he gave on the occasion of a VDI - K conference in Munich, Germany.

Heating curing is the next step of our process. This not only accelerates the curing process of the freshly molded blocks, but also assure that the material is dimensionally stable and provides a completely, dry material for best fabrication results.