A great article in Med-Tech Innovation News lists seven considerations for medical device design; it was written by Dan Purvis of Velentium, a company specialising in the design and manufacturing of therapeutic and diagnostic active medical devices. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but consideration number 5 caught our eye:

Design with manufacturing in mind

How “fiddly” are your manufacturing procedures? Unnecessary manual processes and custom inventory drive up lead times, takt times, and production costs. And what about testing? Testability is an important part of design and development. With the right planning, the same test system designed to characterise your device can be efficiently scaled for validation testing, verification testing, and ultimately, manufacturing testing on the production floor. 

If the device you are designing requires adhesive bonding, then specifying a UV light cured medical device adhesive, tested to ISO 10993, delivers good answers to Dan’s questions and assertions. They are single part, demand cure adhesives which very readily fit into automated processes, and will deliver the least “fiddly” procedures. Very fast cure means that the bonding process is not likely to lead to a bottleneck, increased WIP, or adversely affect overall takt times. The fast cure also means that process testing can be carried out fast as well; it isn’t unusual for QA processes to be done in-line, within the production process itself.

Our White Paper Designing-In Light Curing Adhesives will inform you how you might specify UV cure adhesives if you are designing with manufacturing in mind.

Thanks, Dan.

Medical catheter assembly


Posted by Peter Swanson

Peter is the Managing Director of Intertronics. He is mostly involved in strategy, recruitment and helping out the Marketing team.

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