Nearly 20,000 trade visitors attended the "Compamed 2017" (www.compamed-tradefair.com) medical equipment exhibition held in Düsseldorf / Germany from 13-16 November. A total of 780 exhibitors demonstrated their latest developments, many of which were focused on the two key industry drivers of digitisation and miniaturisation.

German plastics processing company Riegler (Nieder-Ramstadt; www.riegler-medical.com) said that the demands being placed on systems and assemblies made from polymers continue to increase steadily. The company is now making plastic parts that weigh in the range of just 0.007 and 800 g. "We are currently actively pursuing the trend towards 3D printing and have presented our first prototypes to customers. We are not only focusing on printing components, we are also concentrating particularly on the printing of tools," said Thomas Jakob, head of Riegler’s Medical Technology business unit.

One of the exhibitors, Danish firm Knudsen Plast (Frederiksvaerk; www.knudsenplast.com), noted that medical equipment companies were increasingly outsourcing their injection-moulding requirements, including the production of injection-moulding tools and the associated process developing and testing activities.

Packaging remains an area of particular importance to the medical sector. One leading supplier, Multivac (Wolfertschwenden / Germany; www.multivac.com), presented its solutions for, among others, the automatic feeding of prefilled plastic and glass syringes, handling modules and carrier systems. The company said that the automation components are able to fill up to 3,000 syringes a minute into the packaging wells, in a reliable and controlled manner. It added that its range of products may be customised in relation to the product to be packaged.