At the back end of 2017, a large European LED lighting company contacted us through our enquiries webpage for a special project. The company who had 9-10 years’ experience in the LED Lighting Industry had recently won a project to build LED lights mounted inside ships and submarines.
The opportunity and challenge: A moisture and dust tight gasket fit for pressurized conditions
The companies workforce was moderate in size, very skilled and experienced but they had little to no experience in producing lighting for marine applications. Subterranean marine environments presented different structural and material problems for their design engineers to master.
This particular project called for a lighting gasket to be produced with a pressure sensitive adhesive applied on one side of the material. The material needed to withstand UV lighting, have a good resistance to salt and have a general toughness to cope with extreme conditions.
The Solution: kSil™ QR400
The scale of the job would require quite a number of the lighting units for each ship depending on the size of the ship in construction.
Initially, the company requested 40 shore solid silicone, after consultation with our material engineers we convinced the company to change material choice over to a closed cell silicone sponge. We selected kSil QR400, this was due to this silicone undergoing a longer post cure which results in the material having little to no volatiles, it lends itself brilliantly to lighting units as this greatly reduces the chances of fogging & outgassing within the electrical enclosure.
Additional benefits of the QR grade also include a faster recovery once compressed, which means a longer lifespan for the closed cell silicone gasket which has obvious economic benefits. To help the company streamline costs we also offered to punch the light gasket for them.
