Over the past 24 months, we have been approached with a large number of product developments in the field of fuel cells and a wide variety of sealing systems for battery seals. New materials and combinations of materials are being used, which require extensive testing and calculations in advance. DESMA has sufficient resources to carry out these developments for customers with its own pilot plant and mould construction at four global locations. A total of around 20 machines with a wide range of clamping forces for a variety of elastomers are permanently available worldwide.
The necessary sealing systems often require extremely thin wall thicknesses and, in the case of battery seals, enormous flow lengths. With the SmartFlow flow simulation, which we have further developed, taking full account of the entire flow stream, including the injection unit, provides very valuable information even before a test mould or series mould is created. As these are very often global development projects, in some cases the complete process development was carried out in our German plant in parallel with the production of the serial mould at the actual production site in Asia. This saved a lot of time in the realization of production plants.
We assume that the demand for such process developments will increase exponentially over the next few years in order to drive forward the change in mobility.
In addition, we are receiving many enquiries from companies that have not been active in elastomer processing up to now and need extensive support for the entire manufacturing process in order to establish these production processes. This then also includes personnel support during the entire start-up phase, which we can offer through our globally positioned application engineers.

Harald Schmid
general sales manager
Kloeckner DESMA Elastomertechnik GmbH