Rey Obnamia of IRP Medical provides insights for designers looking to work with the material.
Material selection can be a critical step in a product development lifecycle. Working with the wrong material for an application can doom it before the design even begins. Therefore, it’s important to work with material experts who know specific options exceptionally well. While silicone is a well-known, well-understood, and well-used material for healthcare, there are still many factors developers need to know.
With this in mind, Rey Obnamia, vice president of quality and regulatory at IRP Medical, answered a couple questions medtech designers should know before selecting silicone as the material before their next project. He covers the critical factors to keep in mind and what types of applications are ideally suited for silicone.
Liquid silicone and the tooling required to use it successfully present a unique set of challenges not able to be handled by many molders or tool makers.