Process notes,
openly logged.

PEEK and other members of its chemical family like PAEK and PEKK are a maturing platform of materials offering expanded use cases and wider adoption across many industries including medical.

PEEK 2.0 is the transition from a niche application material to calculated specification in high requirement applications.

In the medical industry, regrind is a big no-no — but irregular pellets can cause similar issues. Pellets that vary in shape and size, large amounts of fines, and excessive voids or air bubbles all change the rate at which they melt in the extruder.

If you go through the 'Be the Pellet' exercise, you can understand how that irregularity drives inconsistency and defects in your extrusions.

Insourcing extrusions, or any product for that matter, can make a lot of sense on paper. The implementation is easier said than done.

Making sure you understand the important points of a new process — and having the right technical support behind you — is vital.

PEEK and its sister chemistries like PEKK can be tricky — in large part to achieve full crystallinity.

Cleaning these high-heat materials out of an extruder and the tooling is a challenging process unto itself, affecting tooling design and machinery specification.

Thinking about how to share knowledge — how to train extrusion engineers, technicians and operators — needs to be at the forefront of our minds.

Modern extrusion systems actually help with this. They connect to every piece of equipment and gather a tremendous amount of data. Evaluating, tracking and comparing that data will push medical extrusion further into science and away from art.

Science can be taught and trained much easier than art.

The demands in the medical industry are only increasing. Medical manufacturers need to rise to the challenge.

The more creative manufacturers will move the industry forward.