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Medical

The seals that keep sterilizer and washer-disinfector machines sealed and running, plus the silicone sheaths and metal-bonded components that flex through millions of cycles inside endoscopes and medical devices.

Medical, representative product forms

Sterilizer and washer door seals

The vast majority of our medical work is the critical parts that keep sterilizer machines sealed and running. Autoclave and washer-disinfector door seals live in saturated steam at temperature, get slammed shut thousands of times, and have to hold sealing force for years without being re-torqued, which is a compression-set problem before it is anything else. We mold them in one piece, at door sizes from 16 inches up to almost 40 inches.

These run to a device maker's own engineering specification rather than to a catalog print. Dimensional control is taken gage-cone to gage-cone around the seal rather than across a flexible section, so a long soft part can be measured meaningfully. Surface finish is held to RMA F2 on the sealing face and F3 or better elsewhere. Parting-line flash is limited to sixteen thousandths in both extension and thickness. Lumps, cavities and other molding imperfections in the cross-section are not accepted at all, because a defect in a seal cross-section is a leak path. Every part carries the part number, the manufacturing lot index, and the cure quarter and year molded into it, so a seal pulled out of a machine years later can be traced back to the batch that made it.

Compression set is what decides whether a seal like this works in 100% of the cycles it sees, year in and year out, and it is measured in our own accredited lab on the same site that molds the part.

Steam aging, on our own equipment

We prove a new seal compound in the environment it will actually see. Our Corry, Pennsylvania plant houses a working steam sterilizer and autoclaves dedicated to steam aging, so material development for sterilizer seals happens under real sterilization conditions, on our own equipment, rather than waiting on an outside lab or a field trial.

That is how we developed a PFAS-free seal material that needs no surface fluorination. It shows no loss of tensile strength or elongation after more than 400 hours of steam aging, where the PFAS-containing incumbents do.

Sheaths we have made

We have extensive experience working with silicone rubber, particularly in bonding silicone to metal substrates such as aluminum and stainless steel.

Corry Rubber has developed technology to maintain constant wall thickness over the entire length of rubber sheaths for:

  • Colonoscopes
  • Sigmoidoscopes
  • Gastroscopes
  • Bronchoscopes
  • ERCP Scopes