Omnexus.com, a community that provides plastics and elastomers solutions, has partnered with Sabic Innovative Plastics (Riyadh) to offer educational content on resins designed for use in the medical market. The content highlights the Sabic’s Ultem HU1004 PEI Resin, which has multiple sterilization capabilities that enable the development of cleaner, safer materials.

Providing cleaner and safer devices and instruments to medical professionals and patients is a key differentiating factor for OEMs and designers. According to Omnexus, intimately tied to providing such devices is the ability of the base plastic resin to deliver long-term performance, even after multiple and varied sterilization procedures.

Identifying the best material to meet this criterion is now an easy task, thanks to the new medical grade of Ultem Polyetherimide (PEI) resin.

The new Ultem resin is a sterilizable, durable, hydrostable, transparent, and high heat material. It offers multisterilization capabilities and addresses healthcare application needs for process simplification and performance through:

1. Improved durability through exceptional retention of mechanical performance and aesthetics under sterilization conditions
2. Very good chemical resistance to cleaning fluids
3. A dedicated team of high heat resin experts to support your medical product development project

The resin is already being used in healthcare and medical applications requiring multiple sterilization processes to protect against biohazards and to facilitate ease-of-use for the medical professionals. Multiple sterilization processes include: autoclave, low temperature gas plasma, ethylene oxide, and gamma/e-beam radiation.

Examples of potential applications include:

• Surgical devices (tissue stabilizers, skin staplers and laparoscopic device handles).
• Sterilization trays, fluid delivery.
• Components on monitoring/imaging equipment.
• Electronic medical instruments including anesthesia machines and lighting.
• Dental tools.
• Orthopedics tools and devices.

Additional data can be downloaded from the Web site.