Medical Devices Blog (clever name!) has a couple posts on solvent bonding of polycarbonate, something which composes the bulk of the happy medical device company's assembly, well that and PVC tubing to polycarbonate fittings (see the well done descriptive picture). He is using cyclohexanone to bond the polycarbonate and getting 20 lbf tensile strength. This seems about right to me depending on geometry, and is industry standard for this type of bonding. We took efforts to design out most of the polycarbonate to polycarbonate bonds out by designing custom molded parts, which saves on assembly time and gives a superior product. If the cyclohexanone is still tacky after 18 hours you're probably using too much cyclohexanone.We use a couple different solvent dispensors (one from Ventrex) and fixtures to get the application right and ran a few quick studies to determine the ideal amount to apply. Ventrex may be able to help you out with your application, this is one thing I enjoy and think I do well at- letting vendors do the bulk of work for me.
Also industry standard is the ETO sterilization with polycarbonate. At a previous company we tried to gamma sterilize Polycarbonate and that doesn't work well, the fittings became brittle and discolored to varying degrees- that didn't stop us from using them though...
Update, yeah I screwed up the title originally, that should be polycarbonate to polycarbonate.
No comments:
Post a Comment