Customized Rubber Product Development
As an engineering product, Rubber component must be designed accurately to perform at their best. Rubber products can be as simple as Washer to the one of the most complicated engineering component as tire. Even though the smallest washer or O-ring seems simple, it must meet the various application requirements of pressure and surrounding atmosphere. Technologists at Rubber Concept understand the criticality of each and every rubber products and offer various design and development services to their esteemed clients.
Our Engineering and Technical Services include:
- Product design, based on the application
- Mould design and engineering assistance.
- Reverse engineering from existing parts
- Material selection assistance
- Develop, verify customer specification
At development stage, all the rubber products pass from following design and development stages:
- Product design: Based on the application area and rubber product requirement (such as sealing or insulation etc), technical team at Rubber Concept designs rubber product, in consultation with customer. In case of drawing of product or sample, technical team study the same and offer suggestions to the customer for improvement in performance or life of product
- Selection of Raw Material: Rubber Concept excels here. Due to the lack of knowledge of Rubber in the industry, many times, the selection of raw material is not optimized. After studying the application requirements, technical team suggest right rubber material to the customer
- Specification development: Development of rubber product is never complete without specification development. Due to lack of technological development in durability testing on rubber products, it is important to develop physical properties requirements, which guide for durability of products. Understanding the application, Rubber Concept verifies customer specification and offer suggestions. Rightly specified product is very important otherwise under-specified product result in premature failure while over-specified product result in higher costing.
- Rubber Compounding: Rubber Concept excels here. All the rubber components are made by compounding approx. 5-10 different chemicals. The selection of chemicals (from thousands of options) and their optimum dosage is crucial to meet the application requirement.
- Tool design: Considering various Quality and volume as well as production requirements, Rubber Concept technical team design the tool. The design of tool includes various parameters such as type of rubber, flowability of rubber compound, type of mould, parting line, deflashing, no of cavities, cycle time, shrinkage etc. The emphasis is always to achieve closer dimensional control, shorter cycle time, along with minimal flash at non-critical area. For certain critical products where dimensional control is very crucial, we develop transfer as well as tear trim mould.
- Tooling: Once the tool design is finalized, the same goes for the tool manufacturing. Depending on the product, one or more of the following steps are employed for tooling: Planning, Shaping, Surface Grinding, Turning, Milling, Vertical Milling (VMC), Wire-cut, Spark erosion and assembly. After approval of sample from the tool by customer, various types of finishing operations are performed on tooling such as Chemical etching, Polishing, Lettering, Chrome plating etc. Rubber Concept has dedicated approved third party agencies, which perform variety of above operations, as per our requirement.
- Validation: Once the tooling is over, the sample is being produced from the tool with the designated rubber compound. The same will be inspected for dimension as well as rubber properties at Rubber Concept laboratory. After successful meeting the requisite parameters, the sample is sent to customers for validation. After customer validation for assembly and application, the tool and rubber compound is freezed and the same is handed over to production department for regular production.
