TECHNOLOGY & MATERIALS | MEDICAL
The increasing number of devices allowing patients to monitor their health at home is providing growth for injection moulding in
medical applications. Mark Holmes finds out more
Home diagnostic devices boost medical moulding
A general desire of people to monitor their health and the development of eHealth technologies form a major current trend that is giving rise to an in- creased demand for diagnostics products employing injection moulded plastics, according to machine manufacturer Arburg. “This includes smart watches and other measuring devices that can be used to check and evaluate functions such as pulse, calorie consumption, movement and sleeping patterns at any time,” says Sven Kitzlinger, Application Engineer- ing Medical Technology. “Plastic products that perform functions within the body in the form of medical implants also have huge potential. Examples of this are the production of vaginal rings for HIV prevention or resorbable components that remain in the body for a defined period of time and that dissolve when they are no longer required.” Arburg adds that the need to improve produc-
tion efficiency leads to automation of processes and integration of downstream processing steps. “Furthermore, we observe an increasing demand for high-speed machines, for example, for packag- ing of pharmaceutical products or for producing mass articles such as pipette tips,” Kitzlinger says. “Miniaturisation is the key word for minimally invasive intervention with less pain. Increasingly,
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more applications require extremely small parts and micro implants that pose corresponding challenges for reliable, high-precision production. In addition, lightweight construction is being used to produce prostheses with maximum stability at minimum weight. “We are also aware of an increase in applications
that combine injection moulding and additive manufacturing – to produce individually adapted implants and orthotics, for example. We see a huge potential for our Freeformer and Arburg Plastic Freeforming that enable processing of the same qualified standard granulates as for injection moulding in such kind of medical applications.” Arburg has recently added a new machine series to its packaging technology range. The Allrounder Cube machines, which are available with clamping forces from 2,900 to 4,600 kN, are specially adapt- ed for high-speed applications using cube mould technology. Typical medical applications for this machine series are caps and pharmaceutical containers. Arburg says that its micro production cell in turn can be deployed flexibly for the produc- tion of extremely small parts and micro implants, as required in minimally invasive interventions. This comprises a small electric Allrounder 270 A
Main image:
Roche Diabetes Care has selected low-friction
DuPont Delrin acetal
homopolymer for its insulin placement assistant Accu-Chek LinkAssist Plus
September 2017 | INJECTION WORLD 23
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