Saint-Gobain Seals’ Meldin® 5330 Landing Gear Bearings and Sliding Rings Touch Down in Helicopter Flight Test Program

Garden Grove, CA, November 27, 2014 --(PR.com)-- Saint-Gobain Seals’ Meldin® 5330 landing gear shock strut bearings and sliding rings have been selected for use in the flight test program of a military and troop transport helicopter, which is scheduled to start its first test flight in 2015 and production placement in 2019. This helicopter is the largest and heaviest helicopter in its fleet.

Improving upon the payload capability by three-fold while maintaining the same footprint, the helicopter additionally improves maintenance cycle and fuel consumption significantly. As a contributing factor of these benefits, Saint-Gobain Seals’ Meldin® 5330 polymer solutions provide weight reduction and improved performance through better friction and wear performance than typical metal incumbents and DU type bearings. Meldin® 5330 material (belonging to the Meldin® HT product family) is a high-performance polymer based product that was selected by a leading designer, developer and manufacturer of aerospace products for the shock strut bearings and sliding rings used in the nose landing gear (NLG) of the helicopter. These Meldin components fit in the carrier and help provide structural support to the axial load while at the same time withstanding heat generated during landing.

Saint-Gobain Seals has been providing sealing and polymer solutions with superior designs and precision tolerances to their customers in the military and defense industry, general aviation, and space applications for decades with its Meldin®, OmniSeal®, and Rulon® brands, continuing to focus on innovation to meet the needs of better fuel consumption and lower cost of ownership for its customers.

In addition to the Meldin® 5330 material being installed in landing gear, their OmniSeal® spring-energized seals have been qualified as a sealing solution in various sections of the rotorhead in military helicopters and their Meldin® 7001 polyimide material and OmniSeal® seal combine to form OmniGasket™, a high-performance gasket used as a flanged sealing component on aircraft wing slats and their deicing telescopic duct system. In addition to Saint-Gobain Seals products being widely used in the aerospace industry, their sealing and polymer solutions have been selected in other critical application industries such as Meldin® 5000 material for packing kit backup rings for a down hole drilling application in the oil and gas sector and Rulon® J sliding elements for the bogie of new 7000 Series trains in Washington DC in the transportation sector.

To learn more about Meldin® HT and other Meldin® products, please call 401-253-2000, visit www.seals.saint-gobain.com, follow their Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.

About Saint-Gobain Seals (www.seals.saint-gobain.com)
Saint-Gobain Seals is a business unit under Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics’ Engineered Components SOA (sector of activity); our parent company is one of the world’s top 100 industrial groups. With more than 50 years of manufacturing experience and an established global presence (with strategic sites in Garden Grove, California, USA; Kontich, Belgium; and Minhang, Shanghai, China), we offer a diverse range of innovative sealing and polymer solutions:

· OmniSeal® Spring–Energized Seals
· OmniLip™ PTFE Rotary Shaft Seals
· OmniFlex™ Fluoroelastomer Seals
· Rulon® High-Performance Fluoropolymer Compounds
· Meldin® 7000 Thermoset Polyimide Materials
· Meldin® HT High-Performance Thermoplastic Materials

Other products include Fluoroloy® (high-performance custom-formulated compounds), cup seals, hydraulic seals, metal seals, v-packings, piston rings, Marathon® (valves and vacuum pump diaphragms), Transband® (PTFE creepage band), custom parts, polymer bearings and stock shapes.

The majority of seals and polymer components manufactured are custom designed and matched with the best materials to optimize their performance in various applications and markets.