Trelleborg showcases medical device innovations at MEDI’NOV Connection

Trelleborg Healthcare & Medical exhibits component solutions for healthcare and medical applications at MEDI’NOV Connection in Lyon, France, on stand 42, 31 May - 1 June, 2023.

Visitors to the Trelleborg stand can learn about multicomponent technology that creates components beyond the capability of other methods. Medical equipment manufacturers benefit from a process that helps meet their design goals, including reducing the size and weight of components, while increasing their robustness and improving quality, lowering total cost of ownership.

Trelleborg’s Liquid Silicone Rubber (LSR) experts employ highly sophisticated tools and process engineering to develop novel solutions, combining two or more individual materials and parts into one fully bonded, robust component. This multicomponent injection moulding or co-injection – commonly referred to as 2K or 2-shot – produces parts that are more hygienic, eradicating the dead space where bacteria can breed, and lowers costs by cutting out assembly and reducing the number of components in the customer’s supply chain.

A related technology – micromoulding - is critical to the miniaturisation of devices so small they are wearable and implantable. Components below 10 milligrams in weight are possible using needlepoint injection technology and fully automated parts handling. Trelleborg’s high dimensional flashless and wasteless design principles create micromoulded parts virtually flash-free and not requiring secondary deflashing.

Emmanuel Louison, sales engineer at Trelleborg Sealing Solutions, says: “With the development of ever-smaller sophisticated medical devices, component manufacturers are challenged to produce multi-function devices of increasingly compact dimensions. Micromoulding and multicomponent LSR technologies provide a solution to this issue.

“Extending design options further than any other technology, multicomponent moulding enables medical device developers the opportunity to go beyond simple function. Virtually boundless product profiles and geometries offer device designers options that they may not even be aware of.”

Trelleborg Healthcare & Medical is a specialist of mouldings often used in implantable healthcare and medical devices. In-house precision tooling and expertise enable Trelleborg to create custom silicone and thermoplastic moulded parts with tight tolerances, while satisfying the need for rapid product development with quick turnaround prototypes. The Rapid Development Center in Delano, Minnesota, in the US, provides Trelleborg’s global healthcare and medical customers with a single partner for design, rapid prototyping, development, and serial production, ensuring cost control and scalability of customers’ solutions.

Also featured is Trelleborg’s iCast digital manufacturing process, an innovation in LSR processing. Involving no tool investment, it offers a cost-effective way to develop product variations or try out different design concepts before investing in serial production. Cutting concept to production time for prototypes from a typical four and a half months to a maximum of three weeks for the average part, it helps manufacturers meet the pressures of rapidly moving markets that demand quicker new product introductions, improvements and advancements.

Trelleborg’s team will also highlight drug delivery technologies including drug-eluting silicone with active pharmaceutical ingredients (API), and the Seal-Glide nanoscale surface treatment. Compared to conventional solutions, this process is meant to improve friction performance and has a surface finish up to 50 times thinner than those solutions.