Here’s how LED Cure reduces your medical device manufacturing cost

In an industry challenged to manufacture highest quality components at lowest possible cost, light cure adhesives represent a great opportunity to lower manufacturing costs. With such adhesives you will eliminate work-in-progress inventories and speed your production time. Light cures adhesives have the advantage to cure rapidly at high speeds and are easy to automate. 

There are two types of light curing technologies – traditional UV and LED.  LED cure offers considerable advantages over older-generation UV technology. LED can benefit your operation by improving safety, reducing costs, enhancing reliability, streamlining quality inspection and advancing green initiatives.

Similar to UV, LEDs cure adhesives at room temperature. Unlike UV, LED lamps stay cool, which eliminates the risk of skin burns occurring on the manufacturing floor. These cooler operating temperatures also reduce ventilation costs, especially when working in clean rooms.  

LED curing equipment is less expensive overall than UV, and processing costs are lower. Here’s why:

Henkel offers the fastest, tack-free curing, high bond strength adhesives for medical device assembly.  Loctite AA 3951 and LOCTITE AA 3953, two new LED-curing acrylic adhesives, have been tested to Henkel’s protocols based upon ISO-10993 biocompatibility standards, deliver elongation >200% and tensile strengths > 450 psi.  Both adhesives are highly fluorescent before and after cure.

Check out the video here.

To simplify your quality control processes, these adhesives fluoresce in both their uncured and cured states. With a simple black light, your operators can quickly and easily check that the adhesive has been applied to the correct location and that no adhesive has migrated out of the bond line.

Summing up all advantages, LED can be a great cost advantage, leading in some cases to up to 100T€ a year. Interested to learn more? Feel free to contact me for an introduction call or share your comments at the bottom of this article.

This blog is part of a series of blogs on medical device assembly innovation. Check out our last blogs on “proper joint-design for medical devices” here and  “How Adhesive Bonding Enables Miniaturization in Medical Device Design” here.

Author: 

Jason Spencer, Global Market Development Manager Medical Devices