Trelleborg showcases safe sealing expertise at COMPAMED

Trelleborg Healthcare & Medical is showcasing its expertise in the development and manufacture of safe sealing solutions for customers in the medical industry at COMPAMED 2022.

Visitors to the stand will experience how Trelleborg can help customers meet the requirements and global standards of the healthcare and medical industry with safe and durable solutions. From the initial idea to the deliverable product and beyond, Trelleborg partners with customers to guide them through the development process, providing support in specification of materials including application-specific hoses, liquid silicone rubber (LSR) injection mouldings, and the production of parts using multicomponent processes.

Florance Veronelli, segment manager healthcare & medical Europe, says: "Trelleborg offers full expertise in material selection, product design and manufacturing capabilities for medical devices. At COMPAMED we will demonstrate how we partner with customers to develop vital technologies from the very beginning. 

"Trelleborg Healthcare & Medical invests heavily in research and development, operating eight competence centres worldwide, including one in Stuttgart, Germany, and one in Stein am Rhein, Switzerland. At our Rapid Development Center in Delano, Minnesota, US, we use innovative technologies to support the product development of medical and pharmaceutical components, and to produce and test multiple design iterations within a very short period of time to expedite market readiness."

Among the products featured at this year's COMPAMED are multi-lumen LSR tubing for a variety of applications including pacemakers and urological implants. Trelleborg's proprietary GeoTrans extrusion process enables creation of a greater variety of tubing geometries during extrusion, allowing for a range of customer-specific designs. GeoTrans also allows for silicone to change cross-section during extrusion to eliminate moulding and secondary bonding steps, providing a strong, hygienic design. These attributes reduce risks, the amount of work involved in assembly and downstream processes, and lower costs, while significantly improving the usability of medical products.

Also featured are combination products, where a medical device incorporates an Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient (API). Becoming increasingly important in medical treatment, combination products are applied or implanted directly to an affected site and offer numerous advantages over oral administration, injection, or infusion. Benefits include the ability to provide very precise dosing and the reduction of side effects outside an affected site. 

The process can be used for production of skin patches for pain relief or anti-inflammatory implants for the treatment of conditions including eye diseases. Trelleborg will present several examples of such implants and showcase our expertise in the complete development, manufacture, and assembly process of drug delivery components, including a silicone matrix in combination with one or more APIs. 

Trelleborg Healthcare & Medical also offers some of the most sophisticated micromoulding capabilities for overmoulding LSR or plastic over another substrate, such as metal or electronic components. This technique can reduce the overall size of the assembled part and eliminate the need to combine multiple small components together in a secondary process. Multicomponent moulding can extend design options as no other technology can do, giving medical device developers the opportunity to go beyond function. As product profiles are virtually boundless, medical device designers may not even be aware of the potential possibilities.