Foamed plastic wood composite material have low cost, and the advantages of lightweight, high strength, thermal insulation sound-absorbing, market demand and application field will be bigger and bigger, but the difficult to meet the demand of existing products, so need to conduct the thorough research to the product design and process implementation, so as to realize the industrialization of foamed PVC. In recent years, foaming plastic wood composites have become a hotspot in the field of PVC wood plastic decoration and macromolecular materials. Overall, the current study mainly from the foaming mechanism “, “surface modification”, “plastic types” and “enhanced fiber” and “molding process” direction analysis of foamed PVC “material composition”, “molding process, and the relations between and among the structure performance, so as to improve performance of foamed PVC products.

The research of foamed plastic wood composites has made great progress at home and abroad, and obtained a series of important research results to promote the sustainable development of plastic wood composites industry.

The future research trend of foaming plastic wood composites will focus on the following aspects.

1. New foaming technology

The existence of foam holes can overcome the inherent defects of plastic and wood composites and improve the properties of the materials. New foaming technologies such as supercritical fluid injection moulding will be the focus of future research. Improve the PVC interface compatibility for PVC, interface compatibility is an important factor of restricting material application and foamed plastic wood composite materials, the existence of the bubble hole is weakened the connection between the plastic and fibre. Although the coupling agents currently used have certain effects on improving interface compatibility, there is still room for improvement.

2. Functional materials

In order to expand the application range of foaming wood plastic composite materials, developing materials with functions of sound insulation, anti-corrosion and flame retardant, anti-ageing and anti-creep are the next research and development focus.

3. High fibre content

The fibre as a kind of renewable biomass resources, and more energy conservation and environmental protection, the price is lower than a plastic, increase the fibre composition foamed PVC can not only reduce cost, can also speed up the degradation of the material. But increasing the amount of fibre must make foaming more difficult, and some properties of the material will be reduced. Therefore, the increase of fibre content will be the future research direction.

As resources increasingly scarce, people will increasingly demand plastic wood composite materials, the preparation technology of PVC also put forward higher requirements, the future of the foamed PVC will be moving into the direction of product function, diversification.

Foamed plastic wood composite has excellent cost performance and good specific strength, and the addition of additives can endow it with more properties, so it has been applied in many industrial fields. High-performance microfoam wood composites are used in the automotive and aerospace industries to process high strength and lightweight components. The biggest application is to extrude high performance, lightweight plastic wood laminate materials for building products in the automotive interior decoration and Windows market will have a great application.