“There is a lot of growth potential in the medical tubing industry. We wanted to provide a means of demonstrating these capabilities while enabling our customers to run trials,” said Wendell Whipple, Vice President of Davis-Standard’s Pipe, Profile and Tubing Systems. “We held a seminar last September with almost 60 customers and all comments about the line were very positive. We are currently working with two of those customers on similar lines for their medical tubing applications.”

The line features ¾-inch (19mm) and 1-inch (25mm) Davis-Standard HPE extruders, two melt pumps, a high-tech vacuum tank, servo puller/cutter, conveyor/blow-off table and an OD/ID/Wall gauge system, all controlled via the Davis-Standard EPIC III Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition System. The EPIC III control system also has FDA 21.11 technology. The extruders are ported with pressure transducers for screw design development on smaller extruders. To date, the line has been used for applications such as single-lumen micro tubes, multi-lumen tubes, micro-catheter trials, new material development and coextrusion die development. Typically the line is running one week per month for development for screw design, process controls and other technology. Currently there are 1-2 customer trials scheduled per month. The line is also being used for development of tooling for new system orders. This includes tuning of die and tooling packages while equipment is being built in order to streamline the wet test approval process.

Customers interested in scheduling lab time can contact the following people: Bill Lee at blee@davis-standard.com in the Technical Center; Kevin Dipollino at kdipollino@davis-standard.com; or Wendell Whipple at wwhipple@davis-standard.com.

– Malaysian thermoformer SCGM Bhd plans to build a factory in Thailand and expand its extrusion capacity in Malaysia, using some of the nearly 12.9 million Malaysian ringgits (28.5 million yuan) it raised