PrintDesigning low profile, ultra thin, wearable medical devices is a design challenge even for the world’s leading engineers. Tolerances are extremely tight, a single micron makes a big difference, and resin selection is a delicate balance. To answer you questions, we hosted a LinkedIn Live event from the Accumold studio with our DFM/DFMM pro Jeff Dirkx and tool builder and sales engineer Craig Tappe.
They tackled your tough questions on micro molding, thin-wall, hitting micron tolerances, ejection port and gate design, and part geometry.
The audience consisted of Design Engineers, Mechanical Engineers, Product Development Directors and Engineers, Project Engineers and Managers, Quality Engineers, R&D Engineering and Managers, Product Development Engineers, and others.
Transcript: LinkedIn Live Wearable DfMM
Craig: The show today is just going to be on wearable devices and how to design parts for micro molding that will aid in making your device very low profile for the end patient, which is a very key thing. We work a lot with CGMs, insulin pumps lots of different wearable devices all the way from.
smart watches to high volume drug delivery devices to the diabetes space, about anything you can imagine that’s worn on the patient we’re involved with, it seems like so we get a lot of different questions. And I think probably the most common question we get across, multiple markets, even outside of the wearable devices how thin can we mold parts and what needs to go into the design and thought with material selection when it comes to selecting materials to mold very thin parts.
So when you’re thinking about designing low profile components to go on to patients being able to just thin walls up, reduce feature sizes is [00:01:00] critical. So that’s probably the most common question we get. How thin can we mold with this material? At AccuMold, we have quite a bit of experience with thin wall molding.
We’ve done studies in our innovation lab to really figure out what we can do and push the boundaries. We’ve done a lot of different things. Material selection is key for med device. Not only does it need to be biocompatible, but it also needs to be able to fill out a lot of those thin features. Common materials for us or maybe Jeff, you can talk on this a little bit.
Jeff is very familiar with this as well. as well.
Jeff: Yeah I think, Craig, one thing to mention, it’s not just a matter of, pushing the material in there harder and increasing their PSI. So it just crams the material in to get a thin wall.
We do a lot of innovative mold designs and such to keep the stress on the material low and really fill out those features that are all over that component.
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