Elastomerics Blog

Compression – it doesn’t need to be that complicated!

Stockwell Elastomerics’ Applications Engineering Team demystifies compression and all its intricacies with a series of blog posts on this topic.

Since Stockwell Elastomerics created a dedicated team of Applications Engineers, we’ve helped thousands of customers solve various challenges centered on things like material selection, seal design, and gasket troubleshooting. One topic that comes up quite often is the unique mechanical characteristics of silicone rubber – specifically, the “Apps” team often helps educate customers on topics related to compression phenomenon.

A quick online search will reveal plenty of insightful research and academic papers written on the unique properties of silicone rubber, including compressibility and other interesting phenomenon. However, much of this works refers to silicone rubber in an uncured state. While this information is paramount in understanding how to process and manufacture silicone into molded parts, sponges, or foams, it does not provide the practical insight that many of our customers require for their applications.

Stockwell Elastomerics’ customers are often concerned with how a fabricated part will behave in their application. Customers may be curious about properties such as compression force deflection (CFD), compression set, stress relaxation, or other topics. Sometimes, unique applications require very specific stress-strain profiles to provide a desired result.

To help better understand compression, we are creating an ongoing blog series to explore some of the interesting and unique compression behaviors of silicone rubber. Our goal is to provide education on these topics and help relate them to our customers’ interesting applications. Silicone rubber has some very unique behavior – behavior that may not be intuitive to engineers that are not familiar with rubber materials. Most basic engineering curriculum only scratches the surface with the nuances of silicone rubber.

Additionally, we want to share some exploratory testing and research into newer topics in this realm. At Stockwell Elastomerics, we specialize in unique configurations of materials and fabrication methods, so stay tuned for blog posts with information that goes beyond what you find in the technical datasheets for these materials.

Eric French
Senior Applications Engineer, Stockwell Elastomerics

Contact a Stockwell Elastomerics Application Engineer for assistance with compression-related projects.