ExxonMobil's Santoprene Division has been offering TPEs that bond to various engineering thermoplastics for years. But there's always room for more TPEs that can chemically bond to their substrates, according to Seth Barron, consumer products manager for Santoprene. "We've seen tremendous growth in this area," he says. So much growth that the company has just extended its portfolio of materials that targets thermoplastics used often in the consumer electronics industry. These include ABS, polycarbonate, polystyrene and related blends. The company's new B 150 bonding grades, thermoplastic vulcanizates containing EPDM and an undisclosed polymer, are available in 60 and 75 Shore A hardnesses. The company's earlier B 100 EPDM-polypropylene bonding grade for engineering thermoplastics came only in a 55 Shore A hardness. The two new grades are not only harder but also improve on two key technical attributes. They do a significantly better job sticking to ABS substrates, Barron reports. Whereas the B 100 material offered a bond strength of about 21 pli on ABS, the new grades offer a bond that's stronger than the elastomer itself, which has a 800 psi tear strength. "The bond just does not fail. The TPE fails cohesively," says Barron. The new grades also offer better adhesion when overmolding TPE over a previously-molded "cold" insert — as opposed to overmolding over a "hot" first shot in a two-shot tool. B 100 has also under-gone an important change of its own. It recently received FDA approval for some food contact applications, including resealable containers and closures.
Our LinkedIn systems and product design engineering group discusses if they are happy with their decision of remaining a technical contributor instead of becoming a manager.
Against a backdrop of mounting product complexity and a need to keep a lid on development costs, companies are recognizing a need to make simulation a more integral part of the design process. In response, vendors in the CAD world are building out CAE functionality as part of their CAD suites while simulation vendors are building tighter integrations to leading CAD tools. Keith Meintjes, Ph.D., Practice Manager, Simulation and Analysis at CIMdata, Inc., joins Design News CAD Editor Beth Stackpole in this radio program to explore the new face of integrated CAD and CAE, how companies are benefitting from this tighter partnership between platforms, and how integrating CAE earlier in the development cycle pays off in optimized product designs.
To save this item to your list of favorite Design News content so you can find it later in your Profile page, click the "Save It" button next to the item.
If you found this interesting or useful, please use the links to the services below to share it with other readers. You will need a free account with each service to share an item via that service.
Tweet This
6 
