Due to its crystal-clear transparency, high mechanical strength and toughness, as well as its good resistance to chemicals, it can be used for multiple applications requiring high transparency such as transparent pump holders, filters, steam valves, containers boxes and toolboxes, ventilation masks and sight windows.
Jack Dunkley, lead design engineer at medical device development company Haughton Design offered his own testimonial about the product:
“Some of the biggest challenges in medical device development surround designing to ensure that components maintain their strength over their intended lifecycle, in addition to withstanding rigorous cleaning and sterilisation processes.
“ Generally, that limits us as designers to using materials such as stainless steel which can be easily heated up to sterilisation temperatures. Ordinarily, these temperatures take plastics over their glass transition temperature, resulting in geometric changes or degradation of the strength of the material. If a design requires properties that only a polymer can provide, such as living hinges, integrated spring features or geometries which metal components wouldn’t be suitable for, typically that device or component would be limited to single use.
“Hospitals don’t typically have the facilities to ETO or gamma-sterilise devices for reuse, so are limited to autoclave sterilisation, which would degrade or destroy most polymer components.
Having a polymer which maintains its properties with a Tg of up to 200°C opens the ability to design regulatory compliant reusable plastic components with the benefits that plastic provides when designing components, without the fear that they must be discarded after one use, or damaged whilst cleaning.”
