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The antimicrobial property is achieved by making use of one of the most important trace elements in the human body. The trace element, present in our food, is essential for a healthy immune system and for building up and maintaining cells, hair, nails and skin. Absolute safety is guaranteed not only by the biocompatibility but also because the technology does not migrate. The antibacterial property is the result of an intrinsic change and not of leaching substances. The surface of a product becomes hostile to bacteria by means of a mere physical and mechanical action.
Testing plates made out of Parx Plastics SANI-ABS
The first materials taken into mass production at the Italian facility in Bologna are a Sani-ABS and a Saniconcentrate based on Eastman’s copolymer Tritan. These are uniform grades used as a carrier incorporating the technology that mix at 3% with plain material of the same kind. The mixture brings forth a product with an antimicrobial property of up to 99%. “Being able to offer these off-the-shelf solutions is a great step forward bringing our biocompatible technology to the market.” according to Michael van der Jagt, one of the founders of Parx Plastics. “The past few months have been pretty turbulent for our organization receiving great interest from many of the largest corporations. The world is moving towards more sustainable solutions and customer pressure is rising. Companies that ignore the shift away from harmful chemicals and dangerous substances are bound to loose or be left behind.”
Parx Plastic, with facilities in The Netherlands, Italy and China, brings to the market an innovative biocompatible technique to incorporate an effective antimicrobial property into plastics. The company has been announced by the European Commission as one of the top tech startups of Europe and was recently nominated as finalist in the materials category in the World Technology Awards.
Improved medical polymers
Medical PVC products were originally made as replacements for rubber and glass given its benefits of low cost, safety, high performance and flexibility. Glass for centuries has been used as the most reliable items for liquid containers and syringes but plastic offers a better substitute since it can hold liquid content for longer and is nearly as transparent as glass. They have mostly been produced from polyethylene or polypropylene, which means they can be made a lot cheaper than their glass equivalents.
Stéphane Content, sector group manager of The European Council for Plasticisers and Intermediates (ECPI), highlighted how plasticisers have been making PVC usable for medical applications since long. He suggested that items made of flexible PVC containing plasticisers are found in rooms and corridors of healthcare facilities globally and are part of life-saving objects such as tubing, dialysis, endotracheal, feeding and pressure monitoring, catheters, blood and urine bags, gloves, mattress covers as well as flooring and wall coverings.
Companies across the world are availing the potential the medical sector offers for plastic products. Teknor Apex now offers comprehensive medical compounds such as TPE, PVC and plasticisers. Two global medical contract manufacturers have demonstrated the ease and precision with which tubing made from Medalist? MD-500 Series medical elastomers from Teknor Apex can be fabricated during extrusion and post-extrusion or “downstream” processing, enhancing the suitability of these compounds as replacements for PVC.
“In production runs by Dunn Industries, Inc. and Pelham Plastics, Inc., Medalist-based tubing exhibited outstanding performance during extrusion, when subjected to in-line cutting to length, and in secondary operations including hole punching, tipping, printing, and insert molding,” said Ross VanRoyen, senior market manager / regulated products for the Thermoplastic Elastomer Division of Teknor Apex.
These successes follow two other recent demonstrations that Medalist MD-500 Series compounds provide a practical alternative to PVC in tubing: 1) extrusion demonstration runs by American Kuhne, Inc showing the tight dimensional tolerance capability of Medalist MD-500 Series compounds for production even at high-speed (over 360 meters/min.); and 2) development by Teknor Apex of patent-pending technologies for bonding Medalist-based tubing to traditional connectors.
During the past few years, Teknor Apex has steadily progressed in meeting and exceeding these requirements, as demonstrated by its global customers, including crystal clarity, kink resistance, clamp resilience, PVC-like haptics, extrusion at high speeds, sterilization by gamma irradiation or ETO, connector bonding assembly in clinical settings, and everyday handling by healthcare workers.
Dunn Industries—which specialises in medical tubing—extruded Medalist MD-500 Series compounds at its Manchester, NH facility. “The Medalist elastomers exhibited a wide processing window and maintained close tolerances,” said company president Duane Dunn. “Tubing was easily cut to length in-line with extrusion. Our customers value our ability to deliver solutions around the world and Teknor Apex Medalist MD-500 series reinforces this principle.”
Assembled tubing made from Medalist medical elastomer
Pelham Plastics (Pelham, NH), which specialises in custom injection moulding and assembly of medical devices, readily carried out a variety of downstream assembly techniques with tubing produced from Medalist MD-500 Series elastomers, according to John J. Mackey, President. “The fabrication performance of tubing produced from Medalist compounds was outstanding,” Mr. Mackey said. “The tubing was easy to work with even in our most innovative techniques, such as hole-punching and tipping, and we were able to carry out every fabrication technique with great precision.”
Compared with PVC, Medalist MD-500 Series tubing compounds exhibit comparable crystal clarity and mechanical properties; provide similar clamp resilience and resistance to kinking and necking; have a similar “feel”; and are substantially more flexible and significantly less dense than PVC. At the same time they undergo minimal color shift upon heat aging after exposure to gamma irradiation, the most severe type of sterilization. A typical compound in the series, Medalist MD-575, actually exhibits 70% less heat-aged colour shift than a gamma-stabilised PVC compound of comparable hardness. IRNA
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