Creavey Seal Company and Northern Engineering do their bit in the search for Dark Matter by providing the ‘DarkSide50’ Project with high-grade O Ring seals

Creavey Seal Company and Northern Engineering have been supplying high quality O Ring seals to The Gran Sasso National Laboratory for many months, and recently for the ‘DarkSide50’ project – the high profile subterranean scientific search for dark matter 1,400m under the Italian Gran Sasso mountain range.

Astronomical evidence indicates that about 22% of the Universe is made up of non-baryonic dark matter. Several lines of arguments indicate that dark matter consists of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), exotic relics of the Big Bang that exist till today due to their weak interactions with ordinary matter. Understanding the nature of the dark matter is one of the most important open questions in cosmology, astrophysics and particle physics today.

·      Astrophysicists calculate that there isn't enough visible matter to explain the rotation of galaxies

·      They proposed a type of matter that we can't detect in the normal way - dark matter

·      You can't see dark matter directly with telescopes, but its gravitational effect can be seen on visible matter

·      Dark matter should be all around us, so scientists are developing new ways to detect these mysterious particles

The equipment needed for such research is impressive.  Inside a huge tank filled with 1,000 tons of ultra-pure deionized water, is a large metal sphere containing a ‘scintillator’ detector filled with 30 tons of aromatic solvents.  The spherical container also holds a cryostat filled with 50 kg of special argon with extremely low radioactivity, extracted by the physicists from very deep wells in the USA.

 

Clearly, such equipment is highly sensitive and expensive to run.  The last thing the Gran Sasso scientists would want is for a ‘simple’ seal to fail, thereby ruining an experiment or, worst case, distorting valuable data. 

Owing to the fact that Creavey Seals and Northern Engineering carefully control the extrusion of the raw materials in-house using highly accurate laser monitoring equipment, and that fact that they have long-standing supply relationships with the likes of DuPont™ for high-grade and pure materials, they are able to provide fail-safe O Rings that give such critical applications the reliability they need.

One of the Creavey Seal O Ring configurations provided to the DarkSide50 project, is the Creavey Astra Seal – an impressive DuPont™Teflon® encapsulated sprung metal seal used in cryogenic applications in such industries as space, aerospace & defense, food and pharmaceutical and LNG storage etc.  Being the originator of such technology, Creavey Seal Company has a strong history of providing this sealing solution to these demanding markets.

The Creavey Astra Seal

 

 

Update on DuPont Gen X PFOA-Free FEP and PFA Conversion

 

Perfluorooctanoic Acid (PFOA) is a substance that has been used as a processing aid by several materials manufacturers worldwide.  It is used to produce fluoropolymers, which are high performance materials.  PFOA has been found to be potentially harmful and therefore the subject of a replacement strategy.

DuPont, a significant producer of materials that have historically included PFOA, has made excellent progress in exceeding the goals of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) 2010/15 PFOA Stewardship program to eradicate PFOA.  DuPont has developed and commercialized new products and processes that do not use PFOA, and cannot break down into PFOA.  Such new technology has been given the name ‘GenX’. 

Creavey Seals Company is a Business focussed on its responsibilities as an ethical and environmentally conscientious organisation.  To that end, it supports this important move by DuPont., away from PFOA, and will continue to use these high grade DuPont materials.  DuPont FEP and PFA GenX materials have been trialled by Creavey Seals, through extrusion, and have been found to meet the same physical characteristics as the older non-GenX material.  Indeed, DuPont literature, available on the DuPont website, shows that other than the addition of an ‘X’ to the product code, no changes to the material specification have been made.

Creavey has been using the upgraded GenX FEP since September 2012 and will start to use GenX PFA in March 2013.  Creavey Seals Company should be happy to answer any questions on the PFOA phase-out strategy.

Case Study of Rubber to Titanium Bonding

 

 

Northern Engineering (Sheffield) Ltd (Sister Business to Creavey Seals) Significantly Enhances its Rubber to Titanium Bonding Capabilities for Demanding Semi-Con End-User Application

Strong Rubber to metal bonding is difficult to achieve even with the more compatible of those two materials.  Many companies claim to have the capability, but few actually understand it and do it well.  When the two materials in question are a low-outgassing viton bonded to titanium, then you’ll struggle to find anyone willing to get involved in a project at all!

For the past 6 months, Northern Engineering (Sheffield) Ltd (NES) has been working closely with one of its strategic customers to develop a series of small rubber and titanium components destined for a demanding semi-con application.  Not only are such components made up of two materials that exhibit natural bonding incompatibilities, once bonded they must attain tight dimensional tolerances and be strong enough to withstand stringent dynamic and static (destructive) testing.  The stakes are high; failure of these small components could result in £500k of damage per machine!

After the components have been processed, each individual sub-component must be matched to a full set of recorded measurement data, and carefully cleaned in NES’ clean-room packing environment prior to shipping.

Throughout this project, NES has been able to develop an intimate (and most likely market leading?) knowledge of how such a low-outgassing viton compound can work with the unique qualities of titanium.  Much of the value lies in mould-tooling design, surface preparation processes, primer selection and curing configuration (temperature, pressure and duration).  Such insight is likely to give NES strong credibility in markets that require such strong rubber to titanium bonding (for example the wider semi-con and Airspace & Defence industries).

Creavey Seal Company
91 Quinton Road
Scott Township, PA 18447
Phone (570) 587-4588
Fax     (570) 587-4599
www.creavey.com