The industrial world is increasingly global, but when it comes to chemicals and materials, companies can get lost in a maze of regional reporting requirements and regulations. Global food and beverage equipment manufacturers and processing companies, in particular, must address numerous international certifications and standards.
To address this complexity, Freudenberg-NOK Sealing Technologies, a US joint venture between Freudenberg and Co in Germany and NOK Corp in Japan, offers its customers a complete portfolio of advanced elastomeric sealing solutions that perform in challenging environments while concurrently meeting multiple international material standards.
Equally important, the company maintains a comprehensive database of the latest regulations and continuously validates its materials against these standards. Such proactive research has allowed Freudenberg-NOK to engineer world-class seals and gaskets that meet demanding performance and government standards.
“As a leader in certified food and beverage industry sealing solutions, we understand the material complexities that our customers run into,” said Rory Pawl, P.E., director of sales, North America, for the Process Industry sector of Freudenberg-NOK Sealing Technologies. “Not only are our materials researched and developed to meet extremely aggressive hygienic and safety requirements, but they are also developed to meet the most current international material standards.
“By working with Freudenberg as a partner, companies have access to more than the best seals and gaskets available,” Pawl continued. “They also have access to Freudenberg’s extensive materials regulations expertise, Finite Element Analysis and proprietary efforts to develop solutions that exceed all international requirements.”
In addition to superior design and performance measures, Freudenberg-NOK components also concurrently meet multiple international material regulations including FDA, USP Class VI, NSF 51/61, 3-A Sanitary Standards and Regulation (EC) 1935/2004.
This regulatory flexibility is critical to companies that produce food processing equipment, commercial combi ovens and fryers, beverage dispensing systems and dairy processing machinery.
Over the past three years, for example, company scientists have been testing Freudenberg materials already approved under EC Regulation 1935/2004 to validate them against new standards established under EC Regulation 10/2011. Both standards regulate plastics that come into contact with food.
Newly verified and approved Freudenberg materials include polytetrafluoroethylenes (PTFE) such as PTFE E202 (Econol) and PTFE G602 (Flex-O-Form), PTFE V045 and PTFE V037 as well as polyethylene (PE) and Polyamide (PA).
Freudenberg offers food and beverage industry customers precision molded parts, O-Rings, encapsulated O-Rings, flat gaskets, diaphragms, seals for connections, PTFE rotary shaft seals, chevron seal sets, support rings, and bellows. Its Hygienic USIT guarantees dead-space-free sealing of screw heads. The company’s portfolio of high-performance materials also includes ethylene propylene diene monomer (M-class) rubber (EPDM), Fluoroprene XP,fluoroelastomers (FKM), Simriz, nitrile rubber (NBR) and silicone rubber (VMQ).
Early collaboration with customers is the benchmark, Pawl emphasized, to ensure that technical solutions and engineered components meet performance and regulatory standards.
“We aren’t just moulding parts, we are engineering technical solutions to some of our customers’ toughest material and design challenges,” Pawl concluded. “That translates into a lower total cost of ownership for them.”