RESOURCES

Applying Hydrophilic
Coatings

ISurGlide lubricious hydrophilic coatings and primers are pre-formulated and ready to use right out of the bottle. Our primers and hydrophilic coatings are most commonly applied using a dip-coating procedure followed by a UV cure to bond the coating to the surface of your device. The process below applies to both our primers and hydrophilic coatings. Specific parameters vary based on your substrate and use case.

Testing Hydrophilic
Coatings

Performance testing of hydrophilic coatings will ultimately be based on your requirements, but always involves testing for lubricity (slipperiness) and durability. If you’re testing an invasive medical device with a lubricious coating, we use a proprietary tortuous path test created specifically to allow testing of durability and particulate.

Since specialized equipment is generally required for testing hydrophilic coatings, many of our customers choose to have ISurTec perform testing services for them.

Testing Durability
and Lubricity

We test lubricity by measuring the force required to pull a wet coating through silicone pads that pinch the coated device. Force is applied to the pads, and as the device is pulled up through the pinched pads, the friction force is measured. The coefficient of friction of a coating is one common measure of a coating’s lubricity. Testing a coating’s friction over multiple cycles of this pinch tests gives information on the coating’s durability.
ISurGlide’s COF is consistently <0.05, usually 0.02 – 0.03. An uncoated device has a COF > 1.0 typically.