Look at the application of shoe materials from Chinaplas 2025

Chinaplas 2025 opened on April 15 at the Bao'an International Convention and Exhibition Center in Shenzhen, with more than 4,500 international exhibitors and a global gathering of companies from all over the world to showcase their latest advances in materials technology, processing equipment and innovative solutions.
At present, the exhibition has ended, this article will take you to quickly understand the highlights of the scene about shoe materials! The theme of the application of shoe materials at this rubber and plastic exhibition is environmental protection, and many large enterprises have launched solutions for the application of bio-based materials and circular economy; In addition, the shoe materials on display are mainly TPU, and most of the foamed soles are made of supercritical foaming process, which is in line with the concept of green and pollution-free

1. Application of TPU shoe material
TPU (thermoplastic polyurethane elastomer) is a block copolymer composed of diisocyanate, chain extender, and polyol. Among them, the soft segment composed of polyols shows flexibility and toughness, while the diisocyanate ester acts as the hard segment, which gives the material hardness and rigidity, and the hard segment acts as a physical cross-linking point after crystallization, making TPU show high elasticity.

2. Application of TPEE shoe material
TPEE (thermoplastic polyester elastomer) is a class of linear block copolymers containing PBT (polybutylene terephthalate) polyester hard segments and aliphatic polyester or polyether soft segments. TPEE has many excellent properties, in addition to good toughness, resilience, flexural fatigue resistance, tear resistance, friction resistance, chemical resistance and other properties, it also has a wide range of hardness and outstanding low-temperature flexibility.
The resilience and compression set resistance of TPEE after foaming are excellent, and it can overcome the limitations of TPU and PEBA in some properties, such as low-temperature impact resistance and tear resistance.

3. Application of EVA shoe materials
EVA is a random copolymer composed of ethylene and vinyl acetate, of which vinyl acetate (VA) is a flexible segment in the EVA molecular chain, with a mass content of 26%-40%, and ethylene is used as a crystalline segment, which shows a certain softness and high elasticity as a whole.
The resilience of pure EVA foam is generally 40-45%, which is far better than that of PVC, rubber and other materials, and it also has the characteristics of light material and easy processing, so that it has been widely used in the midsole of shoes.

4. Application of nylon elastomer shoe materials
Nylon elastomer is a popular material for high-end shoe materials, and is a common name for polyamide-based thermoplastic elastomer, abbreviated as TPAE, which refers to a thermoplastic semi-crystalline copolymer composed of rigid polyamide hard segments and flexible polyether or polyester embedded soft segments. According to the different soft and hard segments, there are different types of nylon elastomers, among which polyether block amide is more common, that is, PEBA.

5. Application of rubber footwear