Design Custom Made Gaskets Around Their Properties

Designing a custom made gasket should be treated almost like an online dating profile. What qualities are you interested in the most for your product? What are the least important aspects that won’t affect the overall performance of your product? Selecting the right properties in your gasket design will ultimately lead to a material that is best suited for your project without hindering its operation. Trust me, if there were a gasket that excels in every category, there would not be a need for so many gaskets on the market and everyone would use this mystical all-purpose product for everything.

Choosing the best material for your product involves settling on which properties your application requires the most. Unfortunately when choosing which properties suit your application the best there is always a tradeoff in how it will affect other categories. In order to understand how to choose which qualities are important to your application we must first discuss the typical characteristic seen in rubbers and elastomers.

• Abrasion Resistance: This property allows a material to resist wear. This is when a product will resist erosion caused by scraping, rubbing, and other types of mechanical wear.
• Impact Resistance: This property measures a material’s ability to absorb energy and plastically deform without failure. A material’s overall toughness, its resistance to fracture.
• Creep Resistance: Creep resistance is the tendency of a material to deform permanently under stress. It is usually measure by long exposure to high levels of stress.
• Oil Resistance: This property measures the ability of the material to withstand deterioration effect of oil on its physical properties.
• Tear Resistance: This is the property of a material to resist tearing forces.
• Resilience: The physical property of a material that can return to its original form after deformation that does not exceed its elastic limit.
• Tensile Strength: This is the property that measures the greatest longitudinal stress it can bear without failure.
• Vibration Damping: This property measures the materials ability to reduce vibrational oscillation amplitude in a given system.
• Temperature Flex: This is the materials operational temperature range. This property indicates what temperatures the material can function properly at.
• Modulus: This property measures a material’s tendency to deform elastically (non-permanent) when a force is applied to it.
• Hardness/Elongation: Hardness is the property that describes a material being rigid and resistant to pressure. No easily scratched. Elongation is the percentage increase in the original length of the material as a result of tensile force applied.
• Structural Integrity: This is a performance characteristic which designates a materials ability to perform its function under reasonable usage.

Each property has its own unique quality aimed at a specific material property. Some are inter-related through common situations. There are other properties that can be just as important as the ones list above. This includes, but not limited to chemical, electrical, thermal, weathering, radiation, and other more specific types of resistances.

A properly chosen material should be select based on what is required for your application. Choosing a material based on qualities is much less time consuming than sorting through all thousands of different types of gaskets/seal options currently on the market. Generating a list of priorities that must be met and utilizing the expertise of companies that have been in the field for years will ultimately make your life easier and allow you to focus your time on things much more pressing.

Let United Seal & Rubber assist you with making the right choice for your sealing requirements.  As stated, there are multiple options and tradeoffs to consider.  We have been solving sealing solutions since 1974.  We welcome the opportunity to help you with your application.