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Assignee3M Innovative Properties Company
InventorsDennis E. Ferguson, Satinder K. Nayar, Stanley Rendon, Donald L. Pochardt, James N. Dobbs
Estimating the term…
Articles enabled by an injection molding process that molds parts on a carrier web located between mold halves and uses ultrasonic energy to assist flow of polymer melt into the mold cavity. One such article is a carrier web having a high density of molded parts, i.e., bearing an array of molded articles adhered to the web in rows and columns, the articles being spaced closer (center-to-center or edge-to-edge) than the diagonal spacing between articles in the next adjacent row and next adjacent column. Another such article is a microneedle array on a land no more than 250 μm thick on which at least 60% of the microneedles across the array are filled (i.e., completely formed).
An article comprising the combination of a carrier web (34, 94) and an array of molded articles adhered to the carrier web which articles are characterized by microstructural features having an aspect ratio of at least 2:1 said array comprising columns of molded microneedle arrays aligned in the down-web direction and rows in the cross-web direction and in which array the closest center-to-center, or edge-to-edge, distance between the molded microneedle arrays is closer than the diagonal center-to-center, or edge-to-edge, distance between a molded microneedle array and another molded microneedle array in the next adjacent row and the next adjacent column.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.