In our latest Technology Tuesdays podcast, Design World’s Michelle Froese speaks with David Church, president of Sorbothane, Inc. about innovative shock and vibration solutions. Sorbothane has been developing materials and components that isolate vibration, attenuate shock, and damp unwanted noise for more than 40 years.
In this discussion, we cover the unique properties of Sorbothane material, including the benefits of viscoelastic technology for a range of industries, from aerospace and drones to priceless artifacts. We also discuss dual-casting and how Sorbothane works with other materials (such as fabrics and plastics), and how it has adapted to meet ever-evolving market demands (such as “lightweighting”).
The audio and a lightly edited transcript of this conversation follow below. You can also listen to the podcast with David Church from last year here.
Design World (DW): Hello, Everyone! Welcome to Design World’s Technology Tuesday’s podcast. I’m Michelle Froese. Thanks so much for listening! Today, we are joined by David Church, the president of Sorbothane, to discuss innovative shock and vibration solutions.
Sorbothane is a unique company that’s been developing materials and components that isolate vibration, attenuate shock, and dampen unwanted noises for more than 40 years. And it does so for a range of industries, including aerospace, medical, industrial, manufacturing, transportation, electronics — such as our mobile devices — and even the fitness industry.
Company name aside, Sorbothane also refers to the brand name of an engineered viscoelastic polyurethane that flows like a liquid under load. For this reason, it’s ideal for engineering design applications that require shock absorption, vibration, isolation, and acoustic damping. You may have even used Sorbothane as an insole for your shoes, which is how it originated.
This proprietary material serves as a solution to a range of interesting challenges, which we’ll discuss with David today. David, thanks so much for joining us.
David Church (DC): Well, thank you Michelle for having us!
DW: For sure! To begin, can you please provide insight into what Sorbothane is exactly — as a material? What makes it so effective as a solution to shock and vibration?
DC: Sure! Michelle… Sorbothane is a thermoset polyether base polyurethane material. In addition to it being viscoelastic, Sorbothane also has a very high dampening coefficient. Viscoelastic means that a material exhibits properties of both liquid viscosity and solid elastic.
As viscoelastic behavior is desirable in shock and vibration applications, many materials claim to be viscoelastic. Technically, they may be correct. However, many of these materials have only trace viscoelastic properties. So, what makes Sorbothane unique for shock and vibration is that it can isolate both an ‘X’ and ‘Y’ to prevent damaging shock or vibration from penetrating delicate equipment, as well as the human body.
DW: Thanks, David. For listeners who are unfamiliar, can you please explain what viscoelastic means and how Sorbothane can flow under load?
DC: Well, viscoelastic terminology means that a material can flow like a liquid. As it gets compressed, it’ll flow out, but then it also has the properties of elasticity. So, once the load is removed, it’ll return to its original shape.
DW: I mentioned in the intro some of the sectors and markets that it serves. But as a quick example for listeners, can you please share an industry need that Sorbothane uniquely meets?
DC: In our customer’s eyes, every one of their applications is unique to them in their markets. I believe one of the most unique ones — because it’s something that people don’t realize or are aware of — is the transportation of priceless artifacts. We do a lot of work with several museums throughout the world to help ship priceless artifacts from one museum to another, and from one exhibit to another.
And that’s unique to Sorbothane and the markets that we deal in, and that’s not highly publicized. Everybody knows about insoles, and everybody uses them and sees them. But it’s so critical to have a system to ship artifacts around the world. We’re proud to be a part of the systems used for that.
DW: Interesting! In general, have you noticed material needs shifting over time and how has Sorbothane changed or advanced to meet them? I recently learned about the diamond-patterned sheets that you offer, which can form under load while curving with irregular surfaces. Are there other examples that you can share?
DC: The diamond pattern is our latest version of Sorbothane’s isolating sheet products. Now, Sorbothane works best when the material is allowed to move. A standard sheet of Sorbothane, of course, is smooth. But it takes a lot more force to conform that sheet — especially when you’re dealing with a larger one, such as 24-inch by 24-inch — with the diamond-patterned sheet. This is because it has that protrusion of a diamond shape on one face, which allows the material to move and isolate and provide shock-absorbing properties under lighter loads.
This is the reason why we continue to try to develop different profiles, especially on sheet patterns. We want to offer customers options to use a sheet by itself or cut patterns from it to properly isolate their application.
DW: I see. And does Sorbothane work well with other materials? For instance, can it be dual-cast to other materials such as fabrics, plastics, or anything else?
DC: We’ve been dual-casting Sorbothane for the last 30 years to other materials and other urethanes to be a dual system. We also work well with casting to fabric and offer some unique things. We’ve made, for example, an artificial golf turf mat for a company. With that, we were actually casting Sorbothane and then laying a “turf,” which is an artificial grass on top of it. It bonds the two together.
So, for this, you have the shock-absorbing characteristics of the Sorbothane underneath the hitting turf of the golf mat. We’re very flexible in that the material allows us to bond it with just about anything out there. Or, almost any material… of course, there are always exceptions. Some things just don’t bond too well, but we really haven’t seen one yet.
DW: That’s a good thing! Given the demands for lighter-weight materials, does Sorbothane also offer flexibility to meet these evolving requirements?
DC: Sorbothane is known as a dense material. It’s not a foam, so it’s a very dense material. As such, it’s heavy compared to other products out there, such as foam products. The way we combat that in many of the applications is by molding the product. There’s maybe a recess, so there’s less material in certain areas, or it’s molded so there’s a through-hole. Essentially, you’re taking material away from that product or that shape, so it lightens it up. Those are the things that we can do to combat the weight.
Otherwise, we can also dual cast it to a foam. Since foam is much lighter, we can cast it to that. The foam acts as part of the system and mostly for shock and then Sorbothane is there for the heavier loads.
Those are a few ways we can combat the fact that Sorbothane is dense and it is heavy compared to other foam-type products. But if you’re comparing it to other products such as standard nitro rubber, Viton, and neoprene, or even some silicones, then we’re all in the same family of density and weight.
It’s only when you’re dealing with certain foams that you’ll find Sorbothane is much heavier. But when it comes to other types of viscoelastic materials, you know… viscoelastic material is a dense material. So, if you’re using another viscoelastic material and you’re going to compare Sorbothane, the weight of the two are not going to be all that different because they’re all dense materials.
DW: Got it! It sounds like you’ve come up with some unique solutions to work around that and that Sorbathane is comparable to what’s out there. I know, you have design calculators on the Sorbothane website, including those for load rating and impact and vibration. Can you explain how they’re best used?
DC: We’re really happy to have those calculators on our website and they’re a very useful tool for individuals who are looking to develop a proper shape for their application or looking at our standard products — such as rectangles, squares, and some custom shapes. Because sometimes it’s an odd or different shape that they need. What the calculators allow is for customers to determine what shape they need to, say, to combat impact, because we have the impact calculator.
Or you can put in certain information about speed, drop, and weight, and it’ll give you how much compression and spring-back a part would have under the vibration. It’s very nice because, again, looking at a certain shape, it’ll calculate and give you how much isolation you’ll have using a Sorbothane part for your application. The last calculator for load provides how much one certain shape will take load-wise, so that you can see what shape you would need to best dissipate that load over the area of the Sorbothane part.
The calculators are all critical for developing a solution for our customers. And this gives them some basic, initial groundwork. And then once they go through their calculations, then they can reach out to us, and we can fine-tune it with them. They can ask us our opinion about the results they saw and how we can maybe improve upon it. Because there’s sometimes room for improvement. One of our customers may even get very fortunate and when they put the shape in there [the calculator], press the button, all of a sudden, they have something that gives them the exact isolation they want.
DW: Those sound very helpful! I noticed you also have complimentary Design Guides online for engineers or entrepreneurs to download. Can you explain how they’re different or share something more about them?
DC: Well, with the Engineering Design Guide, it allows an engineer or an entrepreneur to calculate some non-standard shapes. You know, with our calculators, they help with the fairly basic shapes. You have a circle, you have a ring, you have a rectangle, and you have a square. And those are the basic shapes.
An engineer using our Engineering Design Guide can calculate a shape that might have a recess in the part or might be eight-sided. You know… this is not a non-standard type of shape that we have in our calculator. So, the Guide allows an engineer to take it a step further and understand and design a more complex shape using the formulas in the Engineering Design Guide.
DW: This sounds very helpful for those who could use some design assistance, especially as the industry demands for materials have changed. And we’ve kind of touched on this, but can you please share or have you encountered any trial-and-error stories or unexpected successes that you might be able to tell us about in relation to Sorbothane?
DC: We always think that Sorbothane is the best material out there for the market for shock and vibration. So, you know, having it be successful is not a surprise to us. I’m trying to think of an application that we came across that we were never used on before and that somebody or a company applied our material to it. But, I have not… I cannot think of anything over the last few years that just jumps out to us that somebody’s using it there… that’s amazing.
But this is because we’ve been around for 40 years, so it’s kind of hard to have something unique that came out of the blue that surprised us. So, that speaks to the longevity of Sorbothane. You know, not too many things are new to us any longer.
However, we talked about in the past how everything has become mobile and the different applications that applications we’re used in for now in mobile devices. This is especially true for the drone industry. I mean, we sell a lot of different custom shapes for people who manufacture mobile cams and drones… I mean, it’s one of our fastest-growing markets. So, I guess those would be the ones that we find out how a drone company has applied Sorbothane to their product. Also, another mobile camera system is now using Sorbothane isolators to give them a clearer image and to take the vibration away… you know, if they’re driving down a road, in a helicopter, or even in a jet plane.
DW: I imagine you’re able to fit smaller and smaller devices with everything downsizing…
DC: Well, that’s it, Michelle. That’s kind of what’s happening. When things get smaller, they get harder to isolate because Sorbothane and many of the isolating materials need to be compressed or “preloaded,” as we like to say. It helps in the function of the Sorbothane material as a viscoelastic material. And when you have something really light and you have frequencies that are relatively low, like in the 10 to 15-hertz areas, you often can’t get enough Sorbothane or a lot of material in there to work because the shape factor has to be in a way that it needs to be compressed.
They’re very challenging applications when you have extremely lightweight and you have lower frequencies. We had a recent application where a company had six motors across a plastic bench, and they had low frequencies, but the whole system only weighed about a hundred pounds. There was no way of developing a proper shape factor with Sorbothane that would isolate it because it was so light for such a large table and such low frequencies. It was just a difficult and challenging project.
So, low-frequency, lightweight products are challenging and everybody who deals in viscoelastic materials for shock or vibration, knows it. That’s a challenge! In the past, everything was made out of metal and steel and everything had a weight to it. Now everything’s going to lightweight materials and that makes it more challenging for people in our markets who are trying to isolate that energy.
DW: Got it! It’s interesting though, to see how the changes over time with materials and demands and the “lightweightness” of devices is changing. Like not just the devices themselves, but all the components that have to go in it, and the materials.
DC: Yes! So, you know, going lightweight just makes it more challenging to take vibration out of products. We like to see things heavy! I told them the solution would be to add about 100 or 150 pounds to the table [referring to the above project], and we’ll be able to help you . But then they said, no, that doesn’t work because it’s some type of mobile device and they’re trying to take the weight out.
DW: Of course! I noticed that you offer custom-engineered products on the homepage of your website for entrepreneurs and engineers. Can you share more about the service and how it’d be ideal for those in either role?
DC: Yes, we’re proud of the services we offer when it comes to developing a solution for a company or for an entrepreneur because we have the resources, using our engineers to assist the engineer or entrepreneur in developing their concept using our material. There’s no charge to any company or any person who comes to Sorbothane and says, “We have a great idea for your material!”
We’ll work with them to look at that idea, and we’ll be honest with them upfront. If we believe it’s a good marriage between their idea and our material, then we will help them at no cost to develop a solution with Sorbothane. Then, we provide them with quotes for the prototype tooling, so they can decide if they want to move forward with the design to test it.
So, there’s like I said, there’s no cost. We do it because we feel it helps us generate new business because, once we develop that solution and test it, then hopefully it goes into production and we’ll make Sorbothane parts for that company or for that entrepreneur.
DW: As you mentioned, it’s been more than 40 years now since Sorbothane was founded. Is there anything new you’d like to share with listeners that we didn’t touch on? Or perhaps, a brief story about how far the company has come since it was first developed.
DC: The history of Sorbothane… you know, throughout the 40 years, we’ve been part of some very large corporations — from British Tire and Rubber when Sorbothane was first developed, and then part of Trello Borg, which is one of the world’s largest manufacturer of rubber products. And then we became independent. Upon becoming owned by private investors. I think we’ve been able to develop a better market for Sorbothane. We’ve had the ability to be more flexible and to move quicker than some larger corporations. This is because we can make decisions quickly, whereas sometimes a larger corporation has a lot of little steps and things they have to do to get things approved.
Over these 40 years, especially in the last 15 or 20 years, our flexibility, our ability to make decisions, and our willingness to look at smaller applications has supported our success.
Maybe in the beginning the usage or the potential is relatively small, but we now have the flexibility to manufacture smaller runs in our production plants. This allows a person or a company who’s coming up with a new idea to launch this product. And if the product’s successful, then, of course, we’re both become successful.
Where some of the larger companies have minimums of 10, 15, 50,000 pieces. But, you know, we’ll make a run for somebody with 500 or even less, depending on the size of the part. We have the ability now to really help smaller companies and entrepreneurs launch new products, and that means a lot.
DW: That’s great! We’re at the end of our available time today, David. Is there anything I should have asked you and didn’t or anything else that you’d like to touch on before we end our discussion?
DC: No… I think Michelle, the questions and what we covered have been very thorough.
DW: Thank you, David! It’s been great connecting with you again.
DC: Thank you, Michelle. It’s our pleasure! And look forward to our next one.
DW: Thank you, listeners, for joining us today. To learn more about us, please visit Design World at designworldonline.com, and be sure to subscribe and share this wherever you listen to your podcast. Thanks again for your time and attention. I hope you all have a productive day!
Sorbothane
www.sorbothane.com
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