Product category:
Thermal processing equipment (drying, curing, etc)
News Release from: Nanon | Subject: Cold-curing of silicone rubber
Edited by the Manufacturingtalk Editorial
Team on 22 January 2007
Cold-curing of silicone rubber saves
costs
Claimed to be a better, quicker and more cost-efficient way of cleaning and post-curing of silicone rubber, a cold-curing process uses pure liquid carbon dioxide.
ColdCuring - a revolutionary alternative to conventional post-curing - has been developed by the Danish company Nanon Our process is based on the use of pure liquid carbon dioxide (CO2) and is superior to the oven method
This article was originally published on Manufacturingtalk on 26 Jun 2001 at 8.00am (UK)
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"The ColdCuringTM process is a breakthrough in cleaning and post-curing of silicone rubber - better, quicker, and more cost-efficient", said Thomas Christensen, vice-president of Nanon and director of Business Development at Nanon.
"It brings new opportunities to exploit many great advantages of silicone rubber in medical devices, whether it is used on the skin or inside the body.
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Co-solvent cleaning process replaces 'trike'
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A number of healthcare companies have shown great interest in our products; among them are the producers of nipples for babies' bottles, silicone implants, duckbill valves, catheters, drainage tubes for the human body, etc." The liquid CO2 penetrates and dissolves the volatile residues in the silicone rubber, and by normal diffusion, the contents of the substances - such as free silicone oils -are reduced to 0.3%.
For example, for baby soothers, this is significantly lower than the EN14350-2 requirement of 0.5% and helps avoid contamination during highly sensitive medical operations where the excess of silicone oils could harm the patient.
The purification also deals with peroxides and cyclicsiloxanes (D4-D20), which, according to the latest health and environmental studies, have the potential for human exposure.
ColdCuring takes place at room temperatures and permits precision molding, so repolymerization does not take place.
This eliminates common problems with slit healing occurring from traditional oven at 200 deg C.
* About Nanon - Nanon nanomanipulation technologies, a polymer treatment process to provide them new properties while maintaining fundamental known physical characteristics of the base material.
The research pipeline of Nanon is quite extensive; it holds more than 20 filed and granted patents.
Many projects are servicing the areas related to healthcare products, purification of silicone rubber, improvement of adhesion between different polymers, impregnating polymers with compounds (color, fragrance, soft agent) etc.
Nanon is part of the Danish NKT industrial group listed on the Copenhagen Stock Exchange with the turnover of more than EUR 1.25 billion.
Nanon will be exposing ColdCuring at MEDTEC, February 27 - March 1, 2007.
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