Article re-posted with permission from Parker Hannifin Sealing & Shielding Team.
Original content can be found on Parker’s Blog.
Customers often call with various sealing challenges. But sometimes their dilemmas can be solved with more robust solutions instead of direct replacements. For example, when a customer is having issues with a PSA-backed hollow seal that keeps peeling away from the bottom surface.
If you need to seal a box with a lid, you may need a 4-corner gasket to seal the contents from dirt and moisture. If you use a solid gasket, the compression force may be too great to effectively close the lid. Using a hollow seal reduces the compression force by orders of magnitude, but it comes with its own set of challenges.
A hollow seal for a box will most often seal between two flat surfaces. The bottom surface will be flat for adhesion to the box, while the top surface is curved to engage the lid as it is seated on top of the seal. However, the disadvantage of this design is the tendency of the flat portion to lift off the bottom surface. Figure 1 illustrates this phenomenon with standard Parfab profile D015.
Article re-posted with permission from Parker Hannifin Sealing & Shielding Team.
Original content can be found on Parker’s Blog.
We receive many requests from customers asking for recommendations on how to retain seals in an application. One of the most popular "quick fixes" is to apply liberal amounts of adhesive to a standard O-ring type product without respect to groove shape or sealing function. However, Parker OES provides a wide array of sealing technologies, offering innovative solutions to accommodate the challenging and vast sealing needs of our customers.
A customer had been using a standard O-ring product on an outdoor electronic device. This part was sealing the external edge of the enclosure and meant to keep out water and dust. The enclosure was plastic injection molded so this extreme edge had irregular geometry to accommodate the molding process. The original proposal was to shove O-ring cord in place and adhere it down with RTV (Room Temperature Vulcanization) so that it did not fall out during assembly. This left a rust colored stripe exposed on a consumer device due to fitment issues. Parker’s proposal was to replace the O-ring cord with a custom hollow extrusion that fit the available space and allowed complete closure, thus not exposing the seal to be visible. The RTV process was replaced with PSA (Pressure Sensitive Adhesive) that was preassembled to the seal and allowed for quick and clean placement during assembly and retention for any maintenance needed.