This company came to Kavia Moulded Products as a start-up company having done over 2 years’ product development and intellectual property protection. One key feature of the design was the pump base seal originally conceived in silicon using a soft medical specification silicone (two part cast process) in order to get the desired spongy/flexibility required to seal against the body. It’s a messy and very slow process, but DX were unaware of any other alternative that could be injection moulded, with a medical quality material.
4PLAS is a principal materials partner for Kavia Moulded Products and suggested a super soft low shore hardness FDA/medical formulation grade from thermoplastic elastomers (TPE) family for injection moulding. Specifically the Elastron G 400 A12N SEBS (styrene ethylene butylene styrene) shore 12A.
This is a very soft material; at thick sections over 1 cm in this instance, it has sponge like properties. Trials went very well on prototype tooling – the product performed and functioned just as well as the silicone component, and it was then quickly commercialised. Achieving a good moulding of this key component allowed DX to rapidly grow sales through lower cost and faster production output capability, enabling them to keep up with large new orders which today are now reputed to be worldwide market leading products.
