Effective sealing solutions are crucial in a critical manufacturing setting. Unreliable seals can lead to leaks in mechanical components, equipment damage, and even more severe consequences. To avoid costly damage, you need to ensure that you’re utilizing strategies to boost seal performance, reliability, and safety. While there may be off-the-shelf seals available, finding the right one for your specific application requires expert support. The sealing industry is a specialized field with a wide range of materials and technologies to consider.
To ensure you select a seal that meets your specific requirements and is cost-effective, you need a reputable, full-service sealing consultant and supplier. Full-service technical consultants understand how to improve seal performance, reliability, and safety. In this post, we’ll discuss five strategies we use to assist our clients in achieving those goals:
- Reliability consulting
- Engineering assistance
- Prototyping
- Production volume considerations
- Customization
Read on to learn more about these performance-, reliability-, and safety-boosting strategies and how we support our clients throughout their challenging sealing application projects.
Reliability consulting
Reliability Consulting is an important cornerstone in our seal reliability assessment process. It’s one of the many human elements of our client-centered manufacturing process to help determine the ideal seal for your application. We begin by understanding your needs and objectives to assist you in achieving them. Then, we perform comprehensive seal reliability evaluations. This includes laboratory tests and failure analysis to gain an understanding of the obstacles that impede high-performing reliable and safe sealing solutions. Our experts then collaborate with you to find the most suitable seal materials and technologies for your specific application.
Engineering assistance
Engineering assistance is another strategy to boost seal performance, reliability, and safety. It allows you to work directly with in-house and factory engineers on designing the ideal sealing solution. The process begins with gathering information about the application, such as speed, temperatures, pressures, and fluids, through technical questions and other inputs. Our engineers use this information to design, draw, arrange for tooling, and create seal samples to ensure optimal results.
Production volume considerations
Maximizing strategies to boost seal performance, reliability, and safety shouldn’t be cost-prohibitive. That’s why assessing your production volume is an important strategy for the success of your project. It determines the unit cost of seals and can affect your total project costs.
How many seals will you need? The answer depends on the service conditions and expected life of each seal, as well as the estimated annual usage. In general, the greater your production volume, the lower your unit cost (i.e., buying in bulk).
For example: if you need 100 custom-made rubber O-rings with a 1-year lifespan at under 1000 psi pressure but are only going to use them once or twice per month instead of daily (or weekly), then each seal will only need to last 3–5 months before needing replacement. In this case, we’d recommend using an elastomeric material like nitrile or polyurethane due to its longer lifespan under these circumstances.
Customization
Custom fabrication can help you get the precise result you want: higher-performance, more reliable, and safer seals for your application. We offer custom-made gaskets and seals for any kind of item, from those requiring unique shapes to those that require additional protection for wires or cables. Our expert engineers, with the help of our supplier partners, can design and produce exactly what you need, regardless of the complexity of the project. We will partner with you from beginning to end to make sure that your project adheres to your specific requirements. Our team of sealing experts will also ensure that your project is completed on schedule and within budget.
We are an industry-leading provider of sealing solutions, boasting advanced expertise in material science. This level of expertise is made possible by our utilization of cutting-edge sealing technologies and maintaining partnerships with premier seal manufacturers. Our seasoned experts have cultivated relationships with these industry leaders, allowing us to offer our customers the best options. Whether it be a standard or a custom-made seal, Sealing Specialties has the resources necessary to complete the project. Our team of experts has successfully delivered hundreds of sealing solutions to clients globally since 1986. If you’re facing a complicated sealing problem, reach out to an engineer to find a solution.