In the field of mother and child care, parents place great emphasis on the safety and quality of products. Meanwhile, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has also set strict standards. In the guidelines updated in May 2019, the FDA particularly emphasized the requirements for food contact substances when they come into contact with infant formula and human (breast) milk. Silicone, especially Liquid Silicone Rubber (LSR), has emerged as the material of choice for many manufacturers of mother and child care products due to its unique performance advantages. In this area, SHENGHUI, with its profound professional expertise and advanced technology, provides reliable silicone-based solutions for mother and child care products.
Significant Advantages of LSR Materials
The widespread application of LSR materials in mother and child care products is attributed to a series of outstanding characteristics:
- Excellent Biocompatibility: Highly compatible with the human body, LSR is the ideal choice for product components that require prolonged contact with the body. Whether it’s baby pacifiers, teats, or breast pump accessories used by mothers, LSR ensures peace of mind during use.
- Hypoallergenic: LSR is less likely to cause skin allergies or irritation, making it suitable for the delicate and sensitive skin of infants. In many fields of life sciences, especially in mother and child care products, which frequently come into contact with the human body, this characteristic of LSR effectively guarantees the safety of users.
- Hygienic and Reliable: Although not all components of mother and child care products need to be produced in a cleanroom environment, a clean, highly automated manufacturing process with minimal human intervention can greatly enhance the hygiene level of products. The inherent properties of LSR materials also help reduce the growth of bacteria.
- Stable Chemical Properties: LSR is inert and hardly reacts with other chemicals. It has excellent water resistance, oxidation resistance, UV resistance, and ozone radiation resistance. Moreover, it has good tolerance to cleaning agents, which is crucial for the easy cleaning of baby products.
- Strong Thermal Stability: LSR can maintain its structural stability and flexibility within a wide temperature range from -40°C to 200°C. Whether it’s a baby bottle stored in the refrigerator or a teat frequently sterilized at high temperatures, LSR can handle it easily, ensuring that the product performance remains unaffected.
- Tasteless and Odorless: When designing products such as bottle teats and sippy cups, tasteless and odorless materials are essential. Unpleasant smells or tastes may cause babies to reject food or medicine, while LSR allows parents to use products with confidence.
- Soft and Comfortable Touch: The soft and smooth texture of LSR makes it an ideal choice for baby feeding and soothing products, as well as breastfeeding products for mothers, providing a comfortable experience for users.
- Durable: Food-grade LSR has a low compression set, which means it can effectively resist deformation caused by compression and temperature changes. Even if babies bite or pull on teats and pacifiers repeatedly, these components can return to their original shape without breaking or becoming brittle.
Advantages of LSR Injection Molding
The combination of the LSR injection molding process and the properties of LSR materials showcases unique advantages in the manufacturing of mother and child care products:
- Diversified Custom Products: Products such as bottle teats, seals, teethers, pacifiers, nipple protectors, breast pump accessories, and sippy cup spouts can all be realized through LSR injection molding.
- Advanced Production Process: SHENGHUI’s LSR injection molding process is clean and highly automated, ensuring the precision and consistency of each injection. It guarantees the stability of the production process and minimizes human intervention, meeting the requirements of high-volume and high-hygiene production.
Design Flexibility
- Thin Walls and Undercuts: During the molding process, traditional materials often face difficulties in demolding products with thin walls and undercuts. However, LSR can be demolded easily without damage due to its good compression set and elongation properties. At the same time, it can maintain the shape of thin walls well, suitable for a variety of complex designs.
- Combination of Comfort and Structure: The soft touch of LSR can be combined with hard thermoplastics through overmolding or two-shot molding, such as the soft grip handles of baby bottles or sippy cup spouts. This combination not only ensures the structural strength of the product but also provides a comfortable user experience.
- Integrated Functional Design: It is convenient to integrate functional structures such as valves and membranes into product components. In this way, anti-colic baby bottles can be manufactured, effectively preventing babies from inhaling too much air during feeding. It also achieves a tight seal to avoid liquid leakage.
Functional Integration
The true two-shot injection molding process can combine LSR with engineering thermoplastics in the same production process, creating multi-functional and multi-material composite components. Mother and child care products like sealed caps with integrated LSR vents, sippy cup soft spouts, and handles use this process. It endows products with both the structural strength of rigid plastics and the soft characteristics and functionality of LSR, effectively preventing air from entering the baby bottle and reducing infant gas.
Automated and Hygienic Manufacturing Process
SHENGHUI’s manufacturing process is highly automated. From the mixing and injection of raw materials into the mold, the removal of parts by multi-axis robots, to the transportation of parts on conveyors, the entire process is completed without human intervention. This effectively avoids the introduction of contaminants such as bacteria and viruses, ensuring the hygiene and safety of products. Meanwhile, the advanced molding technology guarantees the efficiency and stability of production, maintaining consistent high quality from the first product to the last.
Post Curing
During the processing of LSR, chemical reactions generate some volatile by-products that remain in the material. Usually, some volatiles will escape naturally over time, but heating can accelerate this process. During LSR molding, the high temperature of the mold can remove most of the volatiles. Sometimes, the finished parts are placed in a static oven at around 200°C for post-curing. Post-curing can not only further reduce the volatile content to meet the standards for food and medical applications but also improve the mechanical properties of the material. However, for sensitive applications such as mother and child care products and medical devices, post-curing may pose a contamination risk.
Application of New Generation Low-Volatile LSR in Mother and Child Care Products
The emergence of new generation low-volatile LSR materials has changed the traditional LSR production model. These materials have already removed volatiles during the raw material manufacturing process. They can meet the strict regulations of a maximum volatile content of 0.5% without post-curing and also comply with strict limits on migrating and extractable substances.
This transparent, blue-tinged low-volatile LSR has a Shore hardness range of 30 – 70A, suitable for baby care, food, and medical products that are sensitive to volatiles. Compared with traditional non-post-cured LSR, its volatile content has decreased from 1 – 2% to 0.2 – 0.3%, and the Dx siloxane content has dropped significantly from 7000 parts per million (ppm) to 500 ppm.
Using low-volatile LSR can not only eliminate the post-curing step, reducing costs but also minimize the risk of contamination:
- Equipment Costs: There is no need to invest in commercial ovens, saving a large amount of capital.
- Energy Consumption: Avoid the electricity costs required to heat the ovens.
- Production Time: Shorten the manufacturing cycle and improve production efficiency.
- Space Occupancy: Free up the space originally used for ovens, racks, and trays for other more efficient uses.
- Labor Input: Reduce the manpower required for operating ovens, moving products, and monitoring the process.
Choose SHENGHUI to Meet Your Mother and Child Care Product Needs
Since its establishment, SHENGHUI has been dedicated to the LSR field, committed to providing customers with the best solutions. With profound professional expertise and advanced technology, SHENGHUI offers a full range of services, from design support, mold manufacturing, sample production to large-scale long-term production. Relying on advanced technology and automated production, SHENGHUI can ensure production stability and efficiency, strictly control contamination risks, and meet strict volatile content standards. For customers with cleanroom production requirements, high-standard cleanroom production environments are also provided.
Contact SHENGHUI now to find the most suitable solution for your mother and child care products. Let’s work together to create safer and higher-quality products for mothers and children!