Medical Tubing and Custom Options for Your Situation
If you spend any time in a hospital, a doctor's office, or another medical facility, you have likely seen medical tubing being used in many different ways. It can be to deliver fluids to the body, deliver medications from a pump, or even to remove fluids from a patient. In some cases, custom tubing is required to work for an application, but there are solutions for that too.
Traditional Medical Tubing
Most of us think about medical tubing as IV tubing, catheters, and oxygen tubing. While all those are important and widely used in the industry, they are not the only ones available. IV and common tubing used daily is a single chamber, a hollow tube, that will allow many different fluids to be passed through it. They are used for blood, medications, fluids, and urine, but what happens if you need a way to bring two or more fluids or functions together in one piece of tubing?
Custom Extruded Medical Tubing
If the time comes that a doctor or practitioner needs a specific type of tubing for a procedure that combines several medications or fluids to pass through it, a custom solution may be required. Medical tubing can be extruded using a die that will allow more than one chamber to be combined into the same piece of tubing. This is helpful for running fluids through the tubing that you don't want to be mixed until they enter the body. Because they are custom made, two, three, or even more chambers can be created inside one single tube if needed.
Materials and Wall Sizes
When custom tubing is created for an application, the materials used can vary from PVC to polyethylene, polypropylene polyurethane, nylon, polycarbonate, EVA, thermoplastic elastomers, or thermoplastic rubbers. Discussing these materials with the manufacturer can help you decide what best suits the needs and the application you are using the tubing for. Along with the material, the size of the tubing, the wall thickness, and the design of the outside can all be customized to meet your needs. Again, discussing these options before the manufacturing process begins will help you achieve a design you need that will work properly for your needs.
Need for Custom Tubing
In most cases, custom tubing is likely to be used with experimental procedures or new procedures that would benefit from slight modification to the equipment used. Sometimes a procedure that has been used for years and still works perfectly can benefit from something as simple a change in the tools or equipment used. This is one time that custom tubing might be a good fit.
Talk to a company such as Diablo Sales to learn more.