Self-lubricating Silicone Rubber Seals| Reduce Friction When Using Silicone Elastomers

Self-lubricating Silicone 

Self-lubricating Silicone is also called asself-lubricating silicone elastomer, self-lubricating silicone rubber.It refers to the silicone rubber material inside, adding lubricating oil with special materials.

Self-lubricating silicone reduce or eliminate the negative impact of friction coefficient of rubber moving seals. The improvement measures include adding additives to the silicone rubber formula to reduce the friction coefficient. 

Why Choose Self-lubricating Silicone Seal?

Self-lubricating silicone improves the problems of poor dynamic sealing effect and short service life of existing silicone rubber. Self-lubricating is suitable for compression molding, extrusion, injection molding. Vulcanized silicone rubber products produce oil fast, moderate amount of oil, and use oil has a certain slow-release effect, not only to ensure the lubrication effect, but also improve the service life.  

The main characteristics of oil self-lubricating silicone are smooth feel, high surface finish, smooth surface, no sticky dust, improved wear resistance and strong adhesion. Secondly, it can play a good role in dustproof and anti-viscosity of silicone products, and it also has low viscosity temperature coefficient and high compressibility. 

Self-lubricating silicone has good oil performance, excellent lubrication performance, long duration. And has excellent high and low temperature resistance, can be used in -50 to +180 degrees for a long time, instant low temperature resistance -70 degrees; High temperature resistance 220 degrees .

Note**It is not suggested to use in most thickened solvents, oils, thickened acid and diluted sodium hydroxide. 

How to choose correct Self-lubricating Silicone?

At present, there are two common ways of self-lubricating silicone, one is to add lubricating oil inside the silicone, which is introduced in this article, and another solution is the use of a low CoF silicone coating applied to the surface and then cured to chemically bond the coating to the substrate for a non-tacky surface.

But now there are many manufacturers in the market in order to save costs, soaked the common silicone in oil as self-lubricating silicone, or fill a large amount of silicone oil through silicone refining, so that the silicon oil precipitates out of the surface due to saturation in the formula.  In this way, silicone products are prone to swelling, and products are also prone to change. On the other hand, it is difficult to control the time and amount of oil produced by silicone, resulting in the stability of different batches of products is difficult to control, which has a great impact on production and use.  

Generally, the self-lubricating silicone is according to the different requirements of the product, the oil rate and the amount of oil, as well as the oil maintenance time.It have a more detailed series of distinction, used for different applications. Overall, the price of self-lubricating silicone is slightly higher than that of ordinary silicone, but it can be used in the stable production of products made of. 

Self-lubricating Silicone Applications:

• Balloons.

• Valves.

• Stoppers.

• O-rings.

• Silicone devices with moving or sliding parts.

• Seals, pump plugs, hydraulic plugs.

• Parts that require assembly.