We use cookies to enhance your experience. By continuing to browse this site you agree to our use of cookies. More info.

What a great experience Omniseal Solutions™ team had at the CTI Symposium in China! It is always a great opportunity to connect with the company’s auto industry colleagues. One question that often arises at these events is about the advantages of low-friction plastic seals. This article reviews some highlights:

Low wear = extended service life. This is a fact when it comes to automotive sealing solutions. In an industry with mandates for lifetime service confidence and zero tolerance for failure, wear-resistant plastic seals are used in numerous applications, including braking systems, oil and fuel pumps, automatic transmissions and more.

The automotive industry is continuously innovating to remain competitive, and simultaneously working to meet the strict safety and environmental regulations. However, as the industry evolves, low-friction plastic seals are quickly adapting. These seals are solving a range of problems to provide various benefits with new, custom designs and improved tooling and testing techniques.

Wear-resistant seals also provide extended performance, making the plastic part last the entire lifetime of the transmission.

Metal sealing solutions were the norm for particular automotive components in the mid-1990s. However, metal-on-metal friction and rubbing lead to accelerated wear and fretting issues. Seals from high-temperature thermoplastics provide a flexible, wear resistant solution that removes any metal-to-metal issues.

Today’s demanding applications, such as planetary ATs or DCTs, would be impossible without thermoplastic seals.

Plastic seals also offer indirect advantages to automotive design engineers. They provide a rigid design that forms a tighter seal. With this lower leakage rate, manufacturers can decrease the size of their oil transmission pumps in order to increase overall fuel efficiency. In addition, these lower leakage rates promote a more environment-friendly automotive component.

Polymer and plastic seals resist corrosive liquids such as brake fluids and oil. Plastic seals, unlike metal seals, do extremely well in a demanding environment without rusting to offer lifetime service confidence.

Low-friction polymer seals can be modified and customized to suit the OEMs’ requirements. For instance, the sealing injection molding process can integrate various functions and material formulations; lubrication channels can be included and sizes can be modified. In terms of the geometry, polymer materials provide extremely high flexibility for a unique part design.

Rectangular seals are normally used on rotating actuators such as clutches and pistons. In order to provide optimal design possibilities, this space-saving seal design has a thickness of just millimeters. However, the thin design can easily accommodate pressures and speeds that cannot be sealed by conventional radial shaft or lip seals.

As the automotive industry continues to develop more hybrid and electric technology, low-friction plastics are perfect for dry-running parts in electric motors. Polymers, unlike metal seals, accommodate minimum counterfaces without surface treatments. They also accommodate a wide range of temperature to withstand heating and cooling cycles, and are lightweight to help reduce drag. Low-friction seals do extremely well for conventional and hybrid automotive technology.

Plastic seals do extremely well in friction reduction for different automotive applications. Customers can contact Omniseal Solutions™ team to learn more about design options for their critical applications!

This information has been sourced, reviewed and adapted from materials provided by Omniseal Solutions™.

For more information on this source, please visit Omniseal Solutions™.

Please use one of the following formats to cite this article in your essay, paper or report:

Omniseal Solutions™. (2021, October 11). Benefits of Low-Friction Plastic Seals in Automotive Critical Components. AZoM. Retrieved on August 19, 2022 from https://www.azom.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=14848.

Omniseal Solutions™. "Benefits of Low-Friction Plastic Seals in Automotive Critical Components". AZoM. 19 August 2022. <https://www.azom.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=14848>.

Omniseal Solutions™. "Benefits of Low-Friction Plastic Seals in Automotive Critical Components". AZoM. https://www.azom.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=14848. (accessed August 19, 2022).

Omniseal Solutions™. 2021. Benefits of Low-Friction Plastic Seals in Automotive Critical Components. AZoM, viewed 19 August 2022, https://www.azom.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=14848.

Do you have a question you'd like to ask regarding this article?

At the Advanced Materials Show 2022, AZoM caught up with the CEO of Cambridge Smart Plastics, Andrew Terentjev. In this interview, we discuss the company's novel technologies and how they could revolutionize how we think about plastics.

At the Advanced Materials Show in June 2022, AZoM spoke with Ben Melrose from International Syalons about the advanced materials market, Industry 4.0, and efforts to move toward net-zero.

At the Advanced Materials Show, AZoM spoke with Vig Sherrill from General Graphene about the future of graphene and how their novel production technique will lower costs to open up a whole new world of applications in the future.

This product profile describes the Flex Raman Catalog.

This is the full list of rotary evaporators offered by IKA Werke.

This product from Alicona features Cobots, which consist of a collaborative 6-axis robot and optical 3D measuring sensors to provide user-friendly measurement automation.

AZoM.com - An AZoNetwork Site

Owned and operated by AZoNetwork, © 2000-2022