A customer working with both hypodermic tubing and PTFE/FEP Dual Shrink tubing asked about gas sterilization of the assembly he is making. He was working with two different sizes of hypodermic tubing, the smallest being our 30 gauge, which has an outside diameter of around 0.008″. The Dual Shrink he was using was our part number SMDT-063, which has a recovered inside diameter of 0.00″, and he was recovering short pieces of this tubing and adhering it to both sizes of hypodermic tubing. He is using ethylene gas and the stainless steel hypodermic tubing, the PTFE and the FEP can all be EtO sterilized. So here’s his question: Will the shrink tubing stay adhered to the hypodermic tubing after going through sterilization? Good question!
I responded to him and let him know that both the shrink tubing and hypodermic tubing can be EtO sterilized. But because we never had a situation where we had to test this, we just didn’t have the answer for him. Hopefully he will test this and let us know the outcome. We hope people like him continue to ask us questions. We may not always have the answer, but we always want to try and be a resource for our customers.