The versatility of silicone rubber makes it a common component in many different fields. But for your silicone rubber product, what manufacturing technique best suits you? This article helps you to understand the main differences between extrusion and molding, therefore enabling you to make smart choices.
Shaping Silicone Rubber: Two Distinct Approaches
Two main key processes define silicone rubber processing: extrusion and molding. Although they accomplish this in different ways and produce different products, both shape silicone rubber. Selecting one of them mostly relies on the intended form and features of the final product.
- Extrusion forces silicone rubber through a die to produce constant profiles. Think about tubes, hoses, seals, weather stripping, and other consistently cross-section objects. For instance, a long, continuous LED strip lighting length wrapped in a silicone diffuser.
- Forming silicone rubber inside a mold cavity produces separate, sometimes complicated forms. Typical examples are keypads, O-rings, medical tools, and automobile parts.For instance: silicone baby bottle nipples are made from a sophisticated, multi-cavity mold.
Silicone Extrusion: The Continuous Profile Expert
When creating large, consistent lengths of silicone rubber with a continuous profile, silicone extrusion shines. Thanks to little material waste and quick manufacturing rates, the technique is quite efficient—especially for large volume production runs.
Benefits of Extrusion:
- Reasonably priced: Especially in large volumes, efficient material usage and fast production rates contribute to reduced per-part costs.
-
Versatile Profiles: Custom-designed dies allow a great variety of unique forms, hence extending design options.
- Constant Quality: The process’s continuous character guarantees homogeneity across extended distances.
When Should One Use Extrusion?
- Your product calls for a constant cross-section.
- Priority is high volume manufacturing.
- Material efficiency is absolutely vital.
Silicon Molding: Complexity and Accuracy
Greater design freedom and accuracy than extrusion come from silicone molding. It shines at achieving close tolerances and building complex 3D forms. Various design complexity and manufacturing volumes are catered for by different molding techniques including transfer molding, compression molding, and injection molding.
Types of Silicone Molding:
- High-precision, high-volume manufacturing with Liquid Silicone Rubber (LSR) in injection moulding Perfect for precise detail on complex pieces.
- Cost-effective for medium- volume runs and simpler designs employing High Consistency Rubber (HCR), compression molding
- Transfer molding is a hybrid method providing a compromise between the cost-effectiveness of compression molding and the injection molding precision.
Benefits of Molding:
- Design Flexibility: This allows you to create complicated 3D forms and detailed elements.
- High Precision: For demanding uses, achieve close tolerances in high precision.
- Material Versatility: Different moulding procedures allow different silicone formulations (LSR, HCR).
When to choose molding?
- Your work calls for complicated forms or delicate details.
- Precise tolerances are really vital.
- The product calls for particular material characteristics provided by LSR or another specialty silicone.
Choosing the Correct Method: Molding or Extrusion?
Choosing silicone rubber extrusion or molding depends on numerous important factors:
- Part Geometry: tubes, hoses, or seals—continuous profiles? Specify extrusion. Complex three-dimensional forms with detailed elements? Choose molding.
- Production Volume: High-volume, basic profiles benefit from extrusion because of its speed and cost-effectiveness. Often fit for molding are lower-volume, intricate products.
- Tolerances: Tight tolerances are easiest attained by molding, especially injection molding. Extrusion provides larger tolerances.
- Material Requirements: Think through the required properties—durometer, temperature resistance, chemical resistance, transparency, etc.—in materials. While a larger spectrum of silicones can be employed in compression and transfer molding, and extrusion, LSR is usually used in injection molding.
- Material Utilization: Extrusion’s continuous nature and low scrap make it a great material tool. Particularly with flash, molding can produce more scrap; modern methods like LSR injection molding reduce waste.
- Typical Applications: Consider similar applications. For instance, if you’re making seals, for long, simple door seals, extrusion would be appropriate; for intricate O-rings, molding would be more appropriate. Similarly, hoses and tubing are virtually always made via extrusion; complex medical devices frequently call for molding.
- Budget: Consider per-part costs as well as tooling. While molding tools are more expensive but can result in reduced per-part prices in large quantities, extrusion usually has cheaper tooling costs.
Partner with Tenchy for Your Silicone Rubber Needs
Tenchy provides a whole spectrum of solutions to satisfy various project needs since it specializes in silicone extrusion and molding. Get in touch now to go over your application and choose the ideal silicone rubber manufacturing technique for your requirements.
