With a tensile strength of up to 50% greater than existing silicone elastomers on the market, NuSil Technology’s High Strength Silicone paves the way for significant advancements in medical device design and performance.
NuSil’s new platinum-cure silicone elastomers provide device and component manufacturers with a super strong, low durometer, high elongation material without compromising hysteresis or tensile set. This combination of properties expands the field of design in high performance healthcare applications such as balloon catheters, where the balloon must be easy to inflate, unbreakable, and must deflate fully for ease of removal. These High Strength Silicones provide design engineers the ability to improve this class of devices by making them thinner, stronger and more resilient.
“I believe that NuSil’s High Strength Silicone platform is one of the more important innovations in silicone science in the past few decades,” said Jim Lambert, Ph.D., NuSil’s Director of Research and Development for Life Sciences. “I’m truly proud of our development team for pushing the boundaries of what seemed chemically and physically possible, and for delivering products that will enable our customers to innovate beyond the conventional performance limitations of silicone elastomers.”
These High Strength Silicones also bridge the gap in strength that has historically prevented manufacturers from upgrading to silicone from latex in high-use devices such as mechanical pumps. This new technology platform provides manufacturers with a super strong tubing alternative that has all of the advantages of silicone – durability, translucency, biocompatibility – and no risk of latex-related allergies.
“We are really excited to be able to offer this breakthrough technology to our customers,” said Scott Mraz, NuSil’s President and Chief Commercial Officer. “As Bill Gates said ‘If you give people tools they will develop things in ways that will surprise you very much beyond what you might have expected.’ We know the products our customers will develop using this new platform will have the capacity to change lives.”