Cases

A Rapid Tooling project for Terumo Europe NV brings us to the medical sector. Materialise provided the prototypes and manufactured the end-use parts of the "Strack system", a stacking solution for syringe pumps.

The design

Terumo is a manufacturer active in the field of clinical and medical products. For their Terufusion® syringe pumps, the company was looking for a way to stack the pumps in some kind of modular multi-infusion system: the result was the "Strack system", developed by Terumo and Achilles Associates*. The Strack system combines both the advantages of a stacking and a racking system: it is compact, extendable and the different pumps can be removed or added independently.

 

(Rapid) Manufacturing the parts

For the newly developed Strack system, Materialise produced the first set of functional prototypes by Selective Laser Sintering. The prototypes allowed the first dimensional verification and an elaborate technical evaluation. The functionality of the modular components was tested thoroughly, as the parts would have to fit perfectly before starting the mould design.

One set of parts consisted of three components. For making the final components by injection moulding, three aluminium moulds would be needed. These moulds were designed using the Magics Tooling software, Materialise' software package for tool analysis, quoting and design. The aluminium tools were produced by High Speed Milling at Materialise RapidParts (UK) and completed within 4 weeks. 200 moulded components were then sent to Terumo shortly afterwards.

 

A successful product

To make the parts through injection moulding in aluminium tools was a perfect choice. Aluminium tooling allows producing low quantities of products at low cost, and ensures a high (production) quality of the parts. Moreover, almost all materials can be used for injecting in aluminium tools. This was a very important factor when producing medical equipment, for which the material was a very specific coloured thermoplast. The moulded parts gave Terumo an excellent solution meeting the request for high quality modular parts, (re-)ordered in small quantities, in the required material.