Microextrusion: Better Catheters With Less Waste with Simone Maccagnan, Gimac

So, you know, as someone coming from injection molding, like, people usually have the, like, the notion, you know, extrusion is a little more simpler than, uh, uh, injection molding since injection molding, you know, you can make much more complex shapes and, you know, the connection with you ta- has taught me is like that that is completely not the case.

You know, you can do a lot of like very complex stuff with extrusion and, you know, it's not just a tube.

It's not just, you know, we have a cylinder and that is like pushed through a die, uh, or a plastic that is pushed through a die and then you have a tube, but you can do, uh, a lot more.

You know, you can have multi-lumen, you can have, uh, co-extrusion, you can have a lot more, let's say, mu- much more complex things.

So you might go into what, let's say, the complexity is of the devices and the, the shapes and forms and, and things you can do with your machines that like a simple extrusion cannot.

Let's say that, uh, you mentioned some macroscopic aspects, the shape, the appearance, eventually the surface.

But there are several other factors that comes first because, uh, when you put under control the microstructural properties which mean the molecular weight, as I mentioned, which is, uh, the potential of the polymer and the crystallinity which is the actual, uh, configuration of the molecules in the polymer, then you can go on the shape and the continuous process.

Imagine multi-lumens.

If you don't have under control the parameters I just mentioned, they will shrink in an uncontrolled way, so they will be uneven along their length.

Uh, if you think about balloon tubes, if you don't have under control those parameters, the tensile properties of the tube partisan before forming the balloon and the mechanical performances of the balloon after having assembled it with the medical device will be out of control, and you don't want that.

You don- you cannot afford that, especially if you want to reduce the profile of the catheter of the device.

Then you need to get the best out of the polymer because you want to use as least as possible.

You want the thi- the thickness to be as thin as possible.

If you want to do that and still have a safe device, you need to be very, very sure that the tube will not break outside of the normal operating condition even if you go a little bit outside of the normal, uh, processing, uh, conditions.

Of course, you don't want it to break or to outper- or to perform in a wrong way within the, uh, normal processing condition.

condition.So what you mentioned here is, you know, like multi-lumen device.

Like I have a very instructive, uh, tubing i-in here.

So this is a very, very thin tube and it has five different...

So it has six lumens actually.

It's like it has a central one, it has five one.

So I probably, even if I hold it into the camera, like the- it's not even possible to get the resolution for this to be, uh, shown on camera.

So it's extremely small what you can do.

So it's very, very fine, um, let's say geometric features that you can have here, and also with a very, very controlled geometry along the length.

This is what, what the machine can do.