machinery feature | Medical tubing
Targor’s Novolen PPH 2150 PP homopolymer. Several different locations were chosen for the lumens, in order to balance the outlet flow. Each computation took around 17 hours to run on a conventional central processing unit (CPU), but less than three hours on the GPU. Results showed that, even with simple parallelisation,
computation times could be reduced significantly for both types of die. “It is important to note that these results were obtained without any complex memory management on the GPU, and therefore there is room for additional future improvements,” said the researchers. The research was published in International Polymer Processing.
IV boost Maillefer has made improvements to its PML extrusion line allowing the production of soft PVC medical intravenous (IV) tubes. Through collaboration with
leading medical device manufactur- ers, it has introduced innovations on tube surface finish and for conditioning.
Graham
Engineering will provide an American Kuhne extruder with touch- screen to Conair’s medical tubing laboratory
Advantages include increased production speed and product optimisation. While a smooth, glossy IV tube surface is appealing, it has the undesirable effect of surface tackiness, which is noticeable when conditioned on coils. This slows down both winding and unwinding. To eliminate this, Maillefer has introduced a feature that adds a textured finish to the tube’s surface and boosts extrusion rates. A second improvement streamlines downstream
Angle Systems’ MLVS is a benchtop
device that measures multi-lumen tubing offline
assembly. Until recently, the conditioning possibilities available from extrusion were either a full length coil (for which a coiler is used), or individual cut lengths (using an integrated cutting machine). In the case of coils, IV tube must be unwound and cut into individual lengths prior to assembly of medical devices. Maillefer’s innovation is to
deliver easy-to-handle coil that contains pre-cut IV tube, which is delivered downstream on coils that can be easily separated for later assembly.
Swapping equipment Graham Engineering and Conair have supplied equip- ment to one another’s extrusion
16 PIPE & PROFILE EXTRUSION | September 2016
laboratories, for development of medical tubing technology. “We have a long history of partnering on extrusion
applications – not only on equipment, but also on expertise in process optimisation,” said Steve Maxson, director of global business development for medical at Graham Engineering. Graham will provide a 1in American Kuhne Ultra CR
extruder with AKcess touchscreen to Conair’s labora- tory in Pinconning, Michigan. At the same time, Conair will supply a MedVac vacuum sizing/cooling tank, MedLine puller-cutter, and MedLine take-away conveyor to Graham’s new medical laboratory in York, Pennsylvania.
“Conair has been on the forefront of efforts to solve
complex medical extrusion challenges such as non-contact and contact vacuum-sizing techniques for small bore medical tubing and cutter blade and bushing designs to cut low durometer, difficult-to-feed small bore tubing,” he added. The laboratory will work on developments including
bioresorbable tubing for stent scaffolds, multi-layer structures for minimally invasive devices and for the delivery of drugs, gradient tubing, and Graham’s proprietary automatic die-centring technology. Conair will use the American Kuhne extruder to
process fluorinated ethylene propylene (FEP) – which is increasingly being used in medical tubing. The extruder can also handle materials like Peek, polyamides and polyurethane.
Measured approach Angle Systems has introduced its Multi-Lumen Vision System (MLVS) – a benchtop device that measures multi-lumen tubing offline. The MLVS can be used on the production floor for quality assurance purposes, or in a lab environment for research and development. It can save time, money and material by providing quick, detailed measurements and eliminating operator- dependent measurement variance. Its capabilities include wall
thickness, area, outer and inner diameters, multi-tubing measure- ments, multilayer measurements and concentricity. Part specifications and tolerances can be set, to alert the operator of any passing and failing measurements. All measurements are achieved in less than 10 seconds. An NIST traceable verification
target is provided to verify calibration as needed to ensure measurement accuracy.
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