Elastomers are materials that demonstrate excellent resistance to deformation and distortion when exposed to pressure and stress. This quality, combined with the materials’ durability and customizability, makes elastomers suitable for a wide range of industrial and consumer applications.
Elastomeric materials are most commonly used in molding operations—including injection molding, compression molding, and transfer molding—to form high-quality parts and components. These operations can utilize a wide range of materials, such as butyl, EPDM, nitrile, silicone, and urethane rubber. At Molded Products, we offer molding capabilities for every type of rubber elastomer.
Advantages of Elastomers
Elastomers exhibit several properties that make them suitable for use in manufacturing applications, including:
- Versatility: Elastomers are available in a variety of formulations with varying material characteristics, colors, shapes, sizes, and degrees of flexibility.
- Durability: Elastomeric products demonstrate exceptional durability in a wide range of environmental and operating conditions.
- Ease of use: Elastomers offer excellent formability and suitability to treatment processes, allowing for shorter production times and lower production costs.
- Thermal insulation: Elastomer foam insulation is a popular add-on to pipes that reduces heat and energy waste.
In recent years, elastomers have become the go-to source material for manufacturing applications. This is primarily due to the several advantages that elastomers have over other materials such as:
- Greater variety: Elastomers can be colored and over-molded. The final products can also be soft or rigid. Thermoset rubber, on the other hand, is more difficult to color, can only be molded once, and has a set texture.
- Better formability: Elastomers are recyclable and have lower cycle times than rubber. These qualities mean manufacturers can produce more elastomeric units within a specific time frame. Elastomers’ capacity for overmolding also reduces errors and material waste.
- Lower material weight: As elastomers are a more lightweight material, they are easier to work with and more cost-effective to transport than thermoset rubbers.
Elastomers find application across a broad array of industries in a variety of products. Typical products include industrial components such as gaskets, ducts, electrical potting materials, and high voltage cables, transportation-related parts such as tires and tubes, and construction materials such as weather-strips and sealing solids.
Our Elastomeric Molding Capabilities
At Molded Products, we provide molding capabilities for virtually any elastomer material available in the market, including natural rubber, silicone, and urethane. Our team can work with your preferred material or supply material recommendations based on a design’s specifications and the cost parameters. We offer a wide array of performance expectation variances, including for durometers and tensile strength.
Our complete turnkey solutions—including product design, blueprinting, testing, fabrication, tooling, and finishing—are custom-tailored to our clients’ unique needs. Some of the industries we serve include:
- Aerospace
- Automotive
- Construction
- Filtration
- Industry
- Oil & gas
We are proud to be an ISO 9001:2015 company as certified by DNV. Our facility and team provide manufacturing services 24 hours a day, five days a week to complete top priority jobs and expedited orders.
Contact Molded Products to Receive a Quote Today
With over 30 years of experience in custom rubber molding, the expert team at Molded Products has the knowledge and skills to design and deliver high-quality custom molded elastomer products. Some of our top services include:
- Compression molding
- Transfer molding
- Rubber-to-metal bonding
- In-house tooling and die machining
- Light assembly
To learn more about our molding services or to partner with us on your next fabrication project, contact us or request a quote today.
Some examples and typical performance expectations are below:
