Swellex™ Swelling fluid helps simplify medical device assembly by making it easier to join silicone, polyurethane or other thermoelastic tubing to rigid plastic or barbed fittings. This speeds assembly times, increasing throughput and boosting your overall productivity. But there are other advantages too.
Helps reduce worker injury:
Swellex™ helps reduce the amount of force needed to insert a tube onto a barb or other type of connector. This is especially true with thin wall tubing that has minimal structural rigidity making it prone to folding over or collapsing during assembly operations. This helps workers avoid potential carpal tunnel, wrist problems and other workplace-related injuries. It also has slight skin and eye irritation, and has low toxicity making it a safer choice than hexane.
Less waste and scrapped parts:
Using Swellex™ helps prevent stress cracks or other tubing damage during assembly. This helps eliminate scrapped parts and reduce waste.
Easier validation:
When using Swellex™, there isn’t a need to introduce heat, glue or other types of adhesives that can affect the integrity of the tube, fitting or device aren’t introduced into the assembly process. This makes it easier to qualify and validate. Plus, Swellex™ doesn’t produce residue that could adversely impact your cleanroom integrity or adversely affect the qualification of your manufacturing process.
Excellent materials compatibility:
Swellex™ is typically used on silicone, a go-to material for medical tubing. It readily swells silicone tube without any impact on other polymers such as polycarbonate or polyurethane and has excellent compatibility with metal components.
Reduced fire hazard;
Swellex™ is an easy-to-handle and reliable alternative to aggressive and more highly-flammable solvents such as hexane.