Silicone Injection Molding
Diving with Liquid Silicone
With the help of liquid silicones from WACKER SILICONES, a completely new diving mask was developed. The resulting sports product has set new standards in soft/soft two-component injection molding.
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WACKER's liquid silicones enabled development of a totally new diving mask
The market for sports equipment differs from most consumer markets:
there’s something new in the shops every season. But tight schedules usually mean that the only thing different is the color or a slight design change. Mares, a long-established Italian company, chose a different path.
Its X-Vision series of diving masks is now produced with a sensational technology known as LiquidSkin.
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A robot takes the finished mask casement from the injection-molding machine
Two-Component Injection Molding
The silicone part of the mask uses two transparent colors. There is a good reason for this unique design:
the silicone touching the skin is soft and fits perfectly, whereas the rest of the frame is firm and stable.
That inspired the mask’s designers to create a two-component silicone mask made via a soft/soft two-component injection molding process using liquid silicone.
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The two-component silicone mask is made via a soft/soft injection molding process using liquid silicone.
Mass-Producible Two-Component Silicone Parts
This was a real challenge, because soft/soft injection molding poses different challenges from those of hard/soft composites.
Admittedly, the plastics experts do not have to contend with a heat-sensitive component, because both the silicones involved cure with heat. Yet instead of a fixed-geometry substrate to be overmolded, there is just another flexible component.
But all the effort put into this novel design was worth it - and resulted in the first genuinely mass-produced two-component silicone/silicone part.
Experts in Material Development
WACKER’s close cooperation with the two participating Italian companies enabled it to be there from the start and give advice as materials specialists. Its application labs and technical center were both involved.
In a very short time, WACKER experts came up with two materials with just the properties the manufacturer needed. So the new X-Vision mask with LiquidSkin technology is a fine example, not only of excellent development work by all those involved, but also of how collaboration in such projects should function.
Customer, manufacturer, moldmaker and materials supplier were all involved right from the start. Working together, they designed an innovative, commercially viable product in a relatively short time.