Rapid Prototyping Solves Unique Bottle and Carboy Cap Situations, While Saving On Costs

The Saint Gobain EZ-Top® product line works with a wide range of industry standard bottle and carboy caps. Non-standard caps require proper alignment and sufficient torque to ensure proper seal integrity.

Saint- Gobain's rapid prototyping capability was used to develop a torque adapter that allowed a customer with an odd size cap to ensure proper sealing. The customer had ordered thousands of EZ-Tops® to be used in a bottle assembly and found a high level of seal integrity failures during QC testing.

After evaluating the cap design, Saint-Gobain Application Engineers determined that the caps needed higher torque than was being applied. Using their Rapid Prototyping capability, they designed, printed and overnighted a torque adapter to the customer.With this tool, the customer was able to properly align and torque the cap and the product passed the leak testing requirements for the assembly, saving tens of thousands of dollars of product cost and keeping the production line running.

This application note is an overview of the rapid prototyping technology utilizing 3D printed parts, and addresses the following questions:

• What is a 3D printed part?
• How does it work?
• Why 3D printed parts?
• What is needed to complete a 3D printed part?