What is the difference between a dispensing tip and a dispensing needle?

Dispensing tips are the components used at the end of an industrial dispensing head to apply fluids to coat, seal, bond, and fill parts of an assembly. There are as many shapes and sizes of dispense tips as there are industrial fluids and applications (see Figure 1), but there are also some commonalities.

Figure 1: Nordson EFD offers dispensing tips in a variety of diameters, lengths, and profiles to serve the needs of all the different types of industrial assembly applications.

The most common style of dispensing tip consists of a steel cannula bonded into a plastic hub (see Figure 2). Cannula diameters can range from multiple millimeters to a fraction of a millimeter. Particularly when attached to a syringe barrel, tips with narrower cannulas are reminiscent of needles used for medical injections. As a result, they are sometimes referred to as dispense or dispensing needles. However, their ends are not sharp, and they are made for industrial use only. The names may be different but the devices – and their functions – are the same.

Figure 2: The most common style of dispensing tip consists of a metal cannula bonded into a plastic hub. As this picture of Nordson EFD General-Purpose dispense tips shows, narrow-diameter cannulas can sometimes look very similar to the type of needles used for medical injections. As a result, these types of dispensing tips are sometimes referred to as dispensing needles.

To learn more about how to select the correct dispense tip for you application see What's the best dispense tip for syringe dispensing?