A few mo
nths ago, our San Marino facility installed a machine that has taken us to the cutting edge of the biopolymer injection moulding industry. Our highly complex, international GMP and FDA compliant moulding process is one of a kind in Italy and ranks among the top ten in Europe. It is a well known fact that polymers in general, and bioresorbable plastics in particular, are a fast-growing resource in the production of both implantable medical devices and healthcare instruments.
The injection moulding process is ideal for manufacturing devices featuring a wide range of mechanical characteristics and resorption properties, and for enhancing high-end engineering polymers such as PEEK.
Through close cooperation with polymer makers we are now able to test new additives to polymer matrices, including different types of carbon fibres, to further diversify the properties of injection moulded devices.
The injection moulding line, consisting of a press and the appropriate accessories, is situated in a clean room to eliminate the risk of contamination.
The process begins with resin pellets which are first pre-dried then fed into a plasticator, where they are gradually melted; the melt is then forced towards the mould. When the desired Melt Flow Rate is achieved, the material is injected into the cavity of the mould, whose shape is that of the finished piece . Once the cavity is filled, the polymer is clamped under a holding pressure for the required cycle time, then cooled until the device solidifies. We plan to launch a new product range in which we will leverage the outstanding characteristics of polymers to meet all osteosynthesis and joint reconstruction needs, thus offering surgeons more choices and better control of the procedure.
|Stefano Caddeo
|R&D
|Lima Corporate | TRAUMA
|Roberto Cianci
|Marketing&Business DevelopmentLima Corporate | TRAUMA
