Rethink Your Heat Shrink
Chapters:
00:00 Welcome and Speaker Introductions
03:16 Why Engineers Are Rethinking Heat Shrink
07:08 Audience Poll: Heat Shrink Materials in Use
09:35 Where PET Falls Short and Why Pebax Exists
12:07 Polyolefin in MedTech: Properties and Applications
20:43 Pebax Heat Shrink for Catheter Design
31:18 Recovering Wall Thickness and Choosing the Right Size
41:17 Non-PFAS Heat Shrink and Sustainability
50:30 Audience Poll: Applications and Design Q&A
56:00 Closing Remarks
00:00 Welcome and Speaker Introductions
Katie Karmelek
Thank you to everyone who’s here today. We’re really glad that you took the time to join us. I’m Katie Karmelek. I am one of the co-founders of Chamfr, and today we’re talking heat shrink.
Specifically, why it might be time to rethink the materials you’re reaching for. A couple of quick logistics before we get into it. This meeting is being recorded, so you will actually get this recording within a week of the webinar. If you have colleagues that couldn’t make it, or anyone else that you think would enjoy the content you see today, feel free to share it with them.
Everyone is muted and your chat is off, but we have Q&A and we really want you to use it. Drop as many questions as you have in the Q&A. We’re going to try to answer them live if we can. If for whatever reason we don’t get to your question and time doesn’t allow us to get to it at the end, we’ll make sure that you get answered afterwards. You’ll get a message from us with an answer to any of your Q&A. So please participate. We want this to be as interactive as possible in this type of setting.
With that said, we’d love to introduce our speakers. So today we have Barry Schnur. Barry is the CEO of Cobalt Polymers and also leads David Schnur Associates, which is Cobalt’s global sales partner.
He’s been a central part of Cobalt’s evolution for 25 years, which is pretty crazy. And if you want to understand the origin story of Pebax heat shrink tubing as a product category, Barry’s largely the reason it exists. Cobalt invented Pebax heat shrink tubing back in 2006, and Barry has spent the two decades since working directly with device engineers to apply it. He’s seen more heat shrink applications and more heat shrink mistakes than anyone I know.
So joining us as well is Alex Miranda. He is the logistics coordinator at Cobalt Polymers. He makes sure that engineers have timely access to materials for evaluation, prototyping, and iteration, and he really helps make sure that you get the parts in your hands as quickly as possible.
Barry, Alex, we’re so grateful to have you both today. It’s going to be a really good discussion.
03:16 Why Engineers Are Rethinking Heat Shrink
Katie Karmelek
Before we dive in, I do want to set a bit of context because this webinar has a specific audience in mind. When most engineers on this call think of heat shrink, they’re thinking of two things. Typically, FEP heat shrink, where you shrink it down, you’re going to reflow the jacket underneath, peel it off, and throw it away. Or PET heat shrink, which a lot of you are probably using right now as a permanent outer layer for braid termination, outer jacketing, or even color coding.
Both are familiar, and both have real limitations. There might be a better answer for certain applications. Not everything. There’s a time and place for each of them. But over the next hour, Barry’s going to walk us through specifically Pebax and Polyolefin heat shrink, how they behave, where they belong, and where engineers get tripped up.
We’ll do a material-by-material comparison, get into grade selection, what it means to choose your recovered wall thickness, wire applications, and we’ll tackle a specific misconception about braided catheter shafts that comes up constantly in R&D.
We’ll also have some news today. Cobalt is introducing a non-PFAS alternative to FEP heat shrink, and we’ll talk about what that means for teams looking to get rid of fluoropolymers and remove them from their manufacturing processes. So there’s a sustainability story here, and we think it’s exciting and worth hearing.
So Barry, we’re going to start with the most common thing you see with engineers when they come to you. How often are they trying to use Pebax or Polyolefin the same way they use FEP as a processing tool? And why does or doesn’t that work? Can you explain that a little bit?
Barry Schnur
Sure. Thanks, Katie, and great to see you as always.
First, we should say we are very excited about heat shrink tubing. I don’t know why, but for whatever reason, the magic of this product that begins in one state and transforms with heat into the proper shape and size enables so many different technologies, both from a manufacturing assistance point of view and also directly on the device.
The flexibility of the process itself to conform to the material lends itself to so many different applications.
Sorry to hijack that, but when we’re talking about the most common applications, what’s really crazy is the variety of applications that R&D engineers in medical devices find ways to use heat shrink tubing for. It’s every single thing.
I was recently in a very large medical device manufacturing facility, and heat shrink tubing for interventional devices was everywhere. Of all kinds, all over the line. It was being used for every single thing. Later on, we’ll actually show a couple of examples and some video of how simple some of these applications are.
I think the key thing is the ease of application and the familiarity of the materials that we’re talking about.
Katie Karmelek
And you probably saw different materials on that line, right? FEP, PET, Pebax, all of it being used in different ways?
Barry Schnur
Yeah. A lot of FEP, obviously, both removable and easy-to-peel forms, and then the traditional materials, lots of Polyolefin material that we were manufacturing, and different things as well. It was amazing to see the variety of different applications.
As far as the most common thing, I would say it started to decline, but a few years ago, particularly with the FEP shortage that was going on throughout the industry, the number one thing people would come to us and say was, we need a different source for heat shrink tubing.
We’d say, what do you need? And they’d say, we need it to be just like FEP, but not FEP.
That does not work.
We’ll talk about why that doesn’t work, but if you start from that point where you’re already all the way down the line and you’re in manufacturing, you’ve got a validated production process, and then you say, I’d like to change this, it’s not going to be an easy shift. At that point, you have a process. Your best hope is to find another source for your FEP, which is now plentiful in the market, and stick with that.
For us, that design change has to happen at a different point. It’s just not a drop-in replacement. But the concept, the idea of let’s get rid of this super expensive, toxic, disposable material, that’s a great idea. You just can’t do it once you’re in a validated manufacturing process.
07:08 Audience Poll: Heat Shrink Materials in Use
Katie Karmelek
Makes sense. I’d love to start with one of our polls now too. I want to get a gauge of what heat shrink people are using.
I’m going to kick this off with our first poll for today. The first poll should be showing on your screen here.
Which heat shrink material do you use most in your medical device projects? Is it FEP, PET, Pebax, Polyolefin, or are you just not using heat shrink at all, which is also great?
I’m really interested. I’m watching some of these come in, and I’ll give folks a few more minutes to answer, but it looks like what you would expect. Most people…
Barry Schnur
Yeah, a lot of fluoropolymers.
And I should say, because this is a live thing, when I say toxic, I’m not suggesting that there’s anything not body-friendly or problematic about the fluoropolymers or about using FEP in a medical device. There’s not.
What I mean is that it is clearly ground zero for forever chemicals. It’s a plastic that is never going away, can’t be recycled, and is just going in the bin. The process of manufacturing fluoropolymer materials is really quite nasty.
Katie Karmelek
That’s great. That’s kind of what we expected. FEP is what people know. It’s the gold standard.
What’s interesting is we did see that people are familiar with Pebax heat shrink that are on the call here. I think it’s a little less understood and less adopted.
We touched a little bit about FEP heat shrink already, but it does also look like people are using PET heat shrink. I’d love to get a sense from you, Barry, on where PET starts to fail in some areas, and where Pebax can help solve some applications that PET can’t.
09:35 Where PET Falls Short and Why Pebax Exists
Barry Schnur
Look, the introduction of polyester and PET heat shrink, and I played a significant role in selling those products and helping people design them in over the years, was an amazing product.
The thin walls, the high dielectric strength, and the other characteristics of that material have made it so ubiquitous in products. Specifically, what it allowed was a heat shrink tubing that could stay on the device.
The challenge, and the thing that we see that we can address, is that it’s not an inherently flexible material. Polyester, Mylar, is an inherently rigid material that becomes more flexible in manufacturing.
What customers were talking to me about even 20 or 25 years ago was, this is great, but what we really need is something thin and flexible, thin and soft.
That was the design impetus that drove this. We thought about, can we take materials that can go onto a medical device, turn them into a heat shrink product, and make them in a form that people would find useful and different from polyester?
So we wanted to do flexible, durable, softer. That’s how we ended up first with the Polyolefins, and then later the same question basically came from catheter engineers in R&D who said, this is great, but I don’t want Polyolefin on my catheter. I want Pebax. Can you make a Pebax heat shrink?
It was not a white-light moment. It was one of those iterative R&D development things that came up in response to our catheter engineer customers.
Katie Karmelek
Interesting. Because Polyolefin has been around for a long time, right? But it’s typically really thick walls in its applications, in electronics and other industries, right?
12:07 Polyolefin in MedTech: Properties and Applications
Barry Schnur
No, and that’s exactly right.
There’s a long history of using low-density polyethylene materials. Actually, even some of the old Raychem RNF 100 non-medical-grade materials are specified in the manufacturing of many legacy medical devices. Not a great choice, because the manufacturer doesn’t actually control them by lot and do all the things that people now require in their devices.
Polyolefins as a class are the biggest class of polymers, so it’s a wide variety of materials. What we tried to do was identify a particular Polyolefin material that would be really tough, really flexible, and give you a bunch of different characteristics that were good.
Again, that was designed not for the catheter manufacturing application, which is where the thicker walls come in, but to do something that would be really thin and stay on the device.
The applications that people have developed are exactly what you would expect. All sorts of different things. Strain relief, encapsulation, electrical insulation, but in very small scale, in tiny device-size scale.
We run really tight tolerance, high-centricity materials. The surface finish is beautiful and everything else, because we know that’s going to be the exterior surface of that device.
Katie Karmelek
And that’s why I know we planned to talk a little bit more about heat shrink first, because people have a little more of a frame of reference. But since we’re going down this road, let’s dive into the Polyolefin side.
People know it in other industries, not in medical. But what you’ve developed here is really novel and unique and not comparable to what we see in the electronics space, with all of its insulated properties and everything.
What makes Cobalt’s Polyolefin unique? Is there something that happens on the manufacturing side, and how should engineers think about this? Is it a drop-in replacement for PET in that case, or does it open up some new applications that people should be thinking about for Polyolefin specifically?
Barry Schnur
I think it’s a great question.
The applications largely overlap. I don’t think there’s a whole separate set of applications for Polyolefin. It’s really designed as an easy-to-use, workable, grab-this-heat-shrink-and-go material where you think you’ve got a strain-relief application, for instance, but in a very tiny scale.
We have a bunch of applications, for instance, that are covering a fiber, a glass optical fiber. If you want to do a sensor-based device and transition that optical fiber through the body of the device and then have a sensor at the end, there are really not a lot of choices. You either have to mold that connector and somehow fit it into place, but heat shrink is a really nice way of doing a couple of things all at once.
We can cover the fiber, give you a body-friendly covering there, and actually bridge that at the edge, give you a nice conformal fit, and transition into the end of the device.
I think it’s that kind of thing. The sizes there are tiny. We make product that goes down to eight-thousandths of an inch with a couple-thou wall thickness, and that’s flexible, easy to use, and can take a coating. It’s not particularly lubricious, but it has a nice surface finish and adapts very well to all of the hydrophilic coatings, to standard products, easy to bond to, and so on.
Katie Karmelek
So with Polyolefin, it is electrically insulative, right? That’s one of its properties.
We have somebody on the line here who has a very specific application, but it’s fun to bring it up here live. They are looking for an electrically insulating material for use in the oral cavity for up to 28 days and then peel it off. Do you think Polyolefin would be a good solution for this?
Barry Schnur
Twenty-eight days in the oral cavity? Sure, why not?
The question is whether this will peel easily enough. As you referenced, we have kind of a bag of tricks we’ve been working on in terms of some other Polyolefin-based materials that might be easier to remove.
So my only question is how they would think about removing it there.
In terms of electrical insulation, the Polyolefin is roughly a thousand volts per mil. Electrical insulation, of course, is primarily a surface property, so that’s an average. You need to test it, depending on how thick we’re talking. If it’s super thin, there’s not a lot there.
By contrast, FEP is half of that. Polyester is as good as it gets, polyester-polyamide materials, but those are usually for normal kind of lower-voltage in-the-body applications. This gives you a significant amount of electrical insulation.
Katie Karmelek
And if they wanted to try it quickly, Alex, where would they get some Polyolefin samples?
Alex Miranda
Definitely from Chamfr.
Katie Karmelek
That was a leading question. Sorry. Had to go there, right?
Alex Miranda
No, we have a lot of our stock sizes available on Chamfr. If you’re not quite sure about your size, we do also offer two different sample kits. One is our four-to-one material, and then we also have a small-diameter sample kit, anything with the expanded ID under 40 thousandths. So we have both of those.
Barry Schnur
That’s great. Thank you, Katie.
Being in Northern California, part of being in this community is quick access to materials right away, so you can try them this week while you’re iterating a medical device. We’ve always worked toward that, not just through Chamfr. If you want a sample of any size that we make, one of the things that we’re dedicated to is keeping all of those things in stock.
Alex has created a sample program here that will get you samples shipped next day. Typically on samples, we just ask you to pick up the FedEx shipping, but you can get a couple of samples. If you just go to the website, there’s a form. You fill that out. No muss, no fuss. They’re going to go.
The Chamfr program was great to integrate into that because we were getting sample requests where people would say, I don’t want one-foot or two one-foot pieces. I need five full-length catheter samples. And that’s what the Chamfr program is designed to do. Those ship within two days. They’re prepackaged, ready to go. I think it’s a great value and a really nice thing that we’ve got.
Katie Karmelek
Excellent. I do want to touch on Pebax heat shrink a little bit more now. We can come back to Polyolefin because I think there’s more.
Barry Schnur
Do you want me to share any of the slides here?
Katie Karmelek
Yeah, please do. Go ahead and share your screen at any point if you have something that you think the audience would appreciate.
What I want to dive into is that we actually already had a Q&A come in about the different durometers of Pebax.
A lot of engineers ask about using Pebax heat shrink to build an outer jacket on a braided catheter shaft. They think, I’ve got varying durometers of Pebax heat shrink. Can I just reflow them all and make my shaft really easily?
Can you walk us through why that doesn’t work in the way that they’re imagining, and what does?
20:43 Pebax Heat Shrink for Catheter Design
Barry Schnur
Thank you. This is, I would say, when we first introduced the product, we spent a lot of time on it.
We make each durometer of Pebax from 40D up to 74D, and have filled that in over time. We’ve made each one of those steps along the way, but almost everything that we ship is either hard, 72, or soft, 40. Our customers either want something hard or they want something soft.
The Pebax-over-braid reflow thing that you described is obviously the traditional interventional high-end catheter. Most of the questions that we originally got were, great, this is awesome, I’ll get rid of the FEP and I just need a segment of each one of those durometers and I’ll just replace the whole thing.
The problem is, it doesn’t work for a couple of reasons, but primarily because of the bond and the transition between the two.
We have found that it’s a real challenge to lay up these two pieces of heat shrink exactly right, get them perfectly positioned, and then have them somehow magically butt-weld when you have a one-and-a-half- or two-thousandths polymer. It just doesn’t really work. The more segments you have, the worse it is.
You can do an overlap. One of the unique properties of our Pebax heat shrink tubing is that it will actually bond. The cross-linking process that we do only partially affects a thermoset transition on this material. It does enough so that it’s a great, stable, functional heat shrink tubing, but it also leaves basically a surface phenomenon so that under heat it will actually create a thermal bond to an underlying material.
That’s unique. There’s no other heat shrink tubing that does that. Many of the applications that our customers have come up with utilize that property because you can get it to basically bond to an underlying metal.
So we have lots of applications, for instance, with ground or tapered wire, where people use this to create a nice concentric tapering polymer jacket for a ground wire or hypotube. Then obviously lots of hypotube and related guidewire-type applications.
But that original idea, which was we’ll just drop this in and get rid of the FEP, had two problems. One was the butt-weld, and the other is that one of the functions of the FEP reflow material is that you reflow the polymer through the braid and grab the exterior surface of that liner.
In many of these really high-end applications, there’s a PTFE liner that’s been etched on the OD. The reflow process jams the material through the braid and creates a sandwich that grabs that liner. If you don’t have that, you have to recreate it in some way.
It was just a process of elimination, painful, but that’s the way it goes in R&D. You try things and they don’t work.
What we found is that you can use the material and create a great insulating layer or an exterior jacket, but if it’s too thin and too low a durometer, our material actually is fairly conformal. So you didn’t end up with a nice thing. You ended up with a bumpy layer around the exterior of that braid surface. That wasn’t really what anybody wanted.
I think we ended up moving on from there.
What’s happened instead, with the evolution of catheter design, is that people have now moved on at the highest end to laser-cut materials. They’re increasingly building the flexibility and design characteristics, mechanical characteristics of the shaft into the laser-cut material itself.
That’s really a better fit for us, because what we can offer is a way to apply a single beautiful exterior jacket, giving you a polymer on the outside that doesn’t impact the flexibility and strength and everything else that you’ve built into the underlying hypotube.
Katie Karmelek
Yeah, that’s exciting.
Somebody just asked, what would you say is the main application of Pebax heat shrink? Where do you see it most commonly adopted today?
Barry Schnur
I think both in volume and application, for us the biggest volume is in actual full-length devices. We’re providing the full catheter length or device length exterior jacket or exterior layer for an endoscope or a scope-like product.
One of the biggest issues around liners is that, at Chamfr’s great panel on laser-cut hypotubes in Mountain View a couple weeks ago, the panelists from Symmetry and others spent a bunch of time talking not about the laser-cut materials themselves, but about the liner and the jacket for the laser-cut materials.
What are we supposed to do with this thing now that we’ve just created it?
It’s been really interesting for me to see the evolution of lots of other players in this space trying to figure out a better technology solution for that issue. It seems like half, maybe more, of these devices really do need a lubricious liner, but the technology of applying that inside of a hypotube isn’t great.
People have come up with some really creative ways of doing this. I think we’re seeing some chemistry solutions that are coming to provide lubricity or introduce a lubricious coating on the ID. There are certainly some of the other tubing companies that now have new materials specifically designed for that liner.
This has been the challenge that’s kept our heat shrink tubing out of some of those applications, because it doesn’t reflow through. It doesn’t go through the laser-cut interstitial spaces.
Katie Karmelek
Right, the interstitial spaces in the cut pattern.
Barry Schnur
Exactly. So the advantage is we’re not screwing up the hypotube that you just spent all this time and money designing. But the challenge is we’re also not going through it, so it can’t grab the liner.
One more question on Pebax before I do another poll shortly. Is it possible to add additives like barium sulfate or others to Pebax heat shrink? Because it is on the extrusion side, on the thermoplastic extrusion. Have you done any additives in the heat shrink?
Barry Schnur
Yeah, we have. It’s not been great.
One of the challenges for us is that we’re making a very thin-walled product. As part of that manufacturing process, there’s heat, there’s pressure, and other things happening. If we add too much of anything to this mix, we end up with a product that we can’t manufacture.
We can do additives, I would say up to a load of five, perhaps eight percent, whether that’s colorant or anything else, but certainly not metals. I don’t think a tungsten-loaded Pebax is in the cards.
Katie Karmelek
And even barium sulfate would probably need at least 20% to get the radiopacity that you want.
Barry Schnur
We’ve done some with 10%, and it was fine.
Katie Karmelek
The process worked, but you don’t then get the benefit.
Barry Schnur
That’s right. The procedure was successful. The patient died.
Katie Karmelek
With that, I’m going to hit our next poll.
This is poll number two.
What is the most challenging part of working with heat shrink in your current designs? Is it selecting the right material, sizing ID and wall thickness, predicting recovered wall thickness, process time, temperature, equipment, or achieving consistent results?
While we wait for these to come through, do you want to talk us through what you’re showing on the screen here in this video, Barry?
Barry Schnur
I figured this would be a great kind of serene background to the poll-taking thing. Maybe if we had some mood music going at the same time as well.
Katie Karmelek
Next webinar, we’ll get some music going.
Barry Schnur
That would be fantastic.
So what we’re showing here is a couple of different samples of larger-diameter heat shrink. One is just to emphasize that we can do products. I think we’re really well known for the super-small stuff, but these are larger tubes.
The previous one was a 160-thousandths 40-durometer heat shrink that we make a lot of. What you’ll see is that this is fairly unremarkable, and that’s sort of the point. This is normal-behaving tubing. It’s heat shrink that you can easily put onto the line and just go with.
For instance, this is super large for us, 240 thousandths, a quarter of an inch, and tiny in terms of wall thickness. Here you’ll see the flexibility, and this is the Polyolefin, not the Pebax. Again, a super interesting hypotube that was laser-cut by Symmetry for us, and just a very easy way of applying a layer of product onto the exterior surface of something.
If you have any kind of application like that, I would just encourage you to try it because this is, as you can see, much easier than dealing with the complexities of a reflow. Yields, we think, are pretty dependable because it’s not that much of a challenge to apply.
Katie Karmelek
Yeah, and it looks like people are struggling with getting consistent results with their heat shrink and are really worried about process time and sizing.
It’s a little bit of a mixed bag of what people need, but achieving consistent results is coming out on top. Finding the right solution like this that can really work for them and bring that consistency to their manufacturing processes seems important.
Barry Schnur
If I can comment on that, the size issue is something we see all the time.
Alex, I don’t know, you probably have a sense of how many times you get repeat sample orders as you’re following up on them, and people just order the wrong size.
Alex Miranda
I was going to say, we have a really good tech team over here too. If you kind of know what you want for your dimensions and things like that, our tech team can really talk to you.
I think somewhere on the slide that we have here too, we have a good example about how your material is going to recover down, so you can get more appropriate sizing. Our team really knows the material well, so we can help you with those steps to find the right material to get what you want for your result.
31:18 Recovering Wall Thickness and Choosing the Right Size
Barry Schnur
Yeah, thank you.
If you’re not absolutely sure of what size you want, you can either set up a call or send us a note. There’s a form on the website that basically says, help me choose the right heat shrink tubing. If you tell us what the substrate OD is and what your target wall thickness is at that OD, and also what material that is, then we can choose the right one, the best off-the-shelf option for you.
Our four-to-one sizes were designed for two things. One, it was cool to have something that could come down from a really big size to a really small size, but the real application for them is for super-thin-walled materials. Almost everybody who buys those materials uses them somewhere near their expanded, basically as-supplied size.
Katie Karmelek
Yeah, they’re not recovering that whole four-to-one distance. They’re keeping it almost the same.
Barry Schnur
No, you’ve got to keep it all the way up there.
The reason is that in most of those sizes, we’re giving you something that’s under a thousandth of an inch. It can be a little challenging to handle because it’s so thin, but there is no other material out there aside from polyester that can give you a sub-one-mil wall. And there’s no way, aside from a solution coating, to get a sub-one-mil wall in Pebax.
That’s what we can get you only in 72, unfortunately, so far. But when it’s that thin, it’s pretty flexible.
Katie Karmelek
That’s great.
We’ve got about 15 minutes left here, so I really want to dive into the non-PFAS solution that you’ve been working on recently. If you can tell us a little bit more about what’s coming to market here and why it matters to folks who are looking to remove the fluoropolymers from both their devices and their manufacturing processes.
41:17 Non-PFAS Heat Shrink and Sustainability
Barry Schnur
Sure.
As you said, when you think about the materials on the market, the fluoropolymers are ground zero for PFAS and forever chemical issues, certainly in California, which is where we are, but throughout the world.
Fortunately, we’re not in any huge rush, but it’s a factor. Many of our customers continue to look, at a less frantic pace, for non-PFAS materials.
We know that our products, both in Pebax and Polyolefin, are that way. The challenge is that our Polyolefin, again, is designed to remain on the device. So it’s super tough. It’s not particularly easy to remove.
We do have customers who use this in manufacturing applications. I don’t know how they’re getting it off, but people do amazing stuff. Whether they’re skiving it or pulling it or whatever they’re doing, we know that that is happening.
There are, though, a number of other polyethylenes, low-density and linear low-density polyethylenes and others, that have been used in the industry for a while in this manufacturing application.
We’ve been working internally to qualify a number of different materials and evaluate which ones will be best for those applications. I think we’ve arrived at a pretty interesting flexible but nice medical-grade smooth material that removes relatively easily.
We are basically in the final stages of standardizing the first three or four sizes that will be offered. The big application here is both for laser welding of balloon tubing onto shafts and also full manufacturing in some cases of reflow materials.
I think there are just a bunch of these manufacturing applications where we know people have historically looked at these products and used them. There are places where, when you have a known solution on the manufacturing floor, you apply it to the next product problem that you have.
What we want to do is add to everybody’s toolkit and give them something else that’s there.
Katie Karmelek
That’s exciting. I hope they’ll be available on Chamfr too once they’re ready.
The other thing with PFAS, from what I’ve been learning and trying to educate myself on, is the manufacturing waste. It’s not just about the product and patient safety. That’s actually not as critical. It’s also how the PFAS products, the fluoropolymers and others, are manufactured and the waste that comes out of that process.
In this manufacturing process, tell us a little bit more about the sustainability angle and what that looks like coming out of Cobalt’s manufacturing process.
Barry Schnur
Thanks.
Sustainability is an important value for us, which in a plastics manufacturing environment is kind of a challenging thing to talk about. But we have a very low-waste facility here. It’s a big value, both internally in terms of what we try to do with our own production and material and reuse.
We’re also looking at potential green certifications over the coming years and what would be the most appropriate thing for us that didn’t come out of just trying to get a certification.
We actually have sustainable power. This facility is powered by geothermal power and other sustainable sources. I think we are getting close, though we haven’t done the full analysis, to a zero-impact type of energy situation, and that’s fairly remarkable because we have some pretty high-power equipment here.
Katie Karmelek
Absolutely. And very little byproduct or waste, right? What’s the only byproduct from your manufacturing process?
Barry Schnur
Right. The only thing we use here as a consumable is IPA. That’s important because the thing that people always are concerned about is, is there something on my tubing? Is there residue on there? Did you use any mold release, for instance? Is there any type of contamination that might come in?
I think that’s a good segue also into this, because it’s important to understand that for this class of materials, you have to cross-link them. Almost everything in this type of product is radiation cross-linked.
So we use electron beam processing. That’s an in-house process here for the last couple of years. It was a huge investment and resulted in some really remarkable changes.
I know our engineering team is watching, so kudos to Bart, Anum, and Tony for everything that’s been done here to get this process rolling.
It’s been so successful, actually, we’ve seen the results in terms of our own process and we’ve begun offering this to customers. We have a few really significant clients that we are providing this service to.
Our equipment was designed for very small-diameter, delicate materials, spool-to-spool, high-speed process, but also consistency in terms of that radiation process.
The nice thing here is, as you said, the consumable is power, and that’s it. There’s nothing else. It’s totally non-contact in terms of the impact on the tubing, but it does affect that thermoset transition that allows us to then go ahead and make heat shrink tubing out of it.
If you don’t do this in this class of materials, you don’t have heat shrink tubing.
That obviously limits the number of players. In most of what we make, there’s really only one other manufacturer. So there’s either a small, friendly, dedicated medical supplier in Northern California or a really large, massive manufacturer somewhere else.
Katie Karmelek
So it’s kind of nice. You can get the best of both worlds, right? Especially as things ramp up, there might be a volume consideration, but you can help them iterate quickly, get what they need fast, and a lot of times that’s what’s really going to be the driver of that project and that product to market, speed of access to the products.
Getting this technology in people’s hands is really impressive. I didn’t know as much about cross-linking and what you’ve done, so I love learning more about that part of the process and how it has allowed you to get the end product that you do have.
It also sounds like you have a proprietary process that allows you to maintain some of that thermoplastic property of the material, which makes it really unique.
Now, this has been a blast. I hope everybody on the call has learned a lot as well.
I’m going to launch our last poll. This is a more applications-focused poll. For the folks that are still with us, what application are you most interested in exploring with Pebax or Polyolefin heat shrink today?
We’ve talked about a lot of different applications today, whether that’s as the entire outer jacket, whether that’s on a scope, on a shaft, the insulative properties on the Polyolefins specifically, strain reliefs.
Cool. Thank you. I love all the participation today. You guys are great.
Looks like we’ve got kind of a tie, with jacketing and bonding, termination, and finishing.
50:30 Audience Poll: Applications and Design Q&A
Barry Schnur
It’s interesting. As far as that termination or bond application, I think it is a place where some of these materials could be unique.
Certainly braid termination, where you’ve got that massive force from the braid trying to expand out into the product, really needs to be customized to that particular application. So if you’re looking at something like that, please try a sample, but also dial us into that and let’s make sure that we’ve got something that’s right for you.
Katie Karmelek
Yeah, that makes sense, because you’re balancing flexibility and strength, right? You can’t have both in this ultra-thin wall, and sometimes the flexibility is going to win, and at other times the strength factor is going to win, like braid termination, as you said.
I think everything we’ve talked about has all come back to this. You guys have to work with the experts at Cobalt Polymers. They know what they’re doing.
It’s great that you can buy it on Chamfr. Definitely try it, have fun, but realize that you’ve got a team of experts backing up that product. So when it’s weird, if it folds on itself, if something doesn’t reflow the way that you’ve anticipated because you’re so used to working with FEP or PET or whatnot, just call them. They’re readily available and ready to chat.
I had one other question before we wrap up here. Do you think it will be possible in the future to achieve lower than 40D in a thin-wall Pebax heat shrink?
Barry Schnur
I don’t know.
If you have a project that absolutely needs this, we’re willing to try. We have tried it in the past. It didn’t work out very well, but there are some things that we could deploy to try this, so it’s possible.
There are big challenges with it because there’s much less structure to the material. But I’d be willing to take it on. It’s a little more of a science project than we’re typically doing.
The other thing, though, is that it is definitely possible to incorporate that lower-durometer material into a design that otherwise uses a 40-durometer, 55-durometer, or 70-durometer Pebax, because those two will bond together.
I think I’ve seen some successful designs that incorporate basically a long length of our heat shrink and then typically that 30, 25, or 33 Pebax that’s being used as a tip. That section is really small, and we can actually overlap on top of that, bond the two materials together, and then you just do a little reflow at the tip to form that thing again as a secondary process.
The fun thing about the Pebax is that property doesn’t go away when the temperature comes down. You can reactivate that bonding property by just bringing it back up to temperature. Then you can overmold on top of it, bond on top of it, reflow on top of our product.
I think the design possibilities are really pretty interesting.
Last comment there. I would say one of the most common issues that we see is people just using the wrong temperature, or not the most optimal temperature.
The temperature that you set it to is not the temperature that the tubing actually sees. Whether that’s time or the dwell time that you need depending on the product that’s underneath it, that is the place where our tech team has been the most help in terms of optimizing processes.
I would just encourage you, if it doesn’t seem to be right, if it’s still wrinkly, if there’s something else that’s going on, there’s probably an issue with the heat.
56:00 Closing Remarks
Katie Karmelek
Great tips. Thank you, Barry.
With that, we’re right at the end of our time here, so I just wanted to remind folks to check Chamfr, because not only do we have Cobalt’s heat shrink in both the Polyolefin and Pebax two-to-one and four-to-one ratios that we talked about here, and more coming soon, but also the R&D kits that they’ve got so you can try different iterations.
We also have a whole resource hub. We have thought leadership, recordings from our other webinars. If you’ve enjoyed this, we have an Unboxed Podcast with Steve Maxson and a ton of other content. So definitely check it out, and I hope that you find things there that are valuable.
Barry Schnur
I think Alex has an unboxing video coming up sometime soon.
Katie Karmelek
Excellent. Yes, right. I love it. I can’t wait for that one.
Then we have a bunch of new tools that we have implemented really with the goal of helping you find the products that you need faster and source them easier. We love making your jobs easier, so if there are other ways and new tools that you think Chamfr can help, let us know.
But we have all the how-to guides on share cart, our dynamic columns to help you filter down and find your products more easily, and even the ability to pay with a purchase order using net terms. So check those all out.
We’ve got a bunch of upcoming conferences too. We just had our MPP West conference in California a couple of weeks ago. We are now having one out in my area on the East Coast in Boston on June 24th, which I’m really excited for. Then we’ll have MPP Ireland in September and MPP Minnesota right before MD&M Midwest on October 27th.
These are great conferences that have dialogue just like we’re having here today, but in a panel session with a ton of thought leadership and great people. It’s a really nice way to interact and share knowledge. A lot of people have given us great feedback that it’s been really valuable from all different backgrounds and roles at different organizations.
Our next webinar is coming up next month. Steve Maxson and Kristin Livesay from Component Supply will be talking about what you do to test the cool components like we’re talking about here today and what that means in getting devices to market faster, because ultimately that’s what we all want to do.
Thank you, Barry. Thank you, Alex. I’ve loved this. I had a ton of fun, and I am rethinking my heat shrink now. So keep telling us all the new innovations you guys are coming up with.
It’s been a blast.
Barry Schnur
Thank you, Katie.
Alex Miranda
Thanks, Katie.
Katie Karmelek
Take care, everybody. Thanks for joining.
Follow us on LinkedIn. Bye.
Alex Miranda
Bye.