What Challenges Can New Tape Technologies Solve in Automotive Bonding?
There are countless applications where different materials need to be attached to each other and strong bonds are essential. The issue is that many surfaces are designed to be highly repellent, making it difficult to bond to like in automotive part assembly.
If you want to avoid holes needed for mechanical fasteners and other weak points that could cause water ingress or weaken the structure, bonding offers many benefits. But in many automotive manufacturing processes, surfaces are pre-treated with chemicals to allow lasting bonding.
In this post, we'll have a closer look at the challenges and problems surface pre-treatment cause, where it is used and how new tape technologies can help solve these challenges to create reliable connections.
First and foremost, bonding needs to be strong and last over the expected lifetime of the product without failure. This sounds trivial at first, but several factors can make automotive trim assembly a real challenge. Exposure to hot and cold temperatures, UV, moisture and other environmental influences, mechanical stresses, salt, chemicals or detergents are only a few stressors bonding needs to withstand over lifetime.
But the main challenge is the nature of highly repellent surface designs. It makes it hard for dirt or any material to stick to it — including adhesives. To allow lasting bonding with adhesives, surfaces may need pre-treatments with primers. Handling these harsh chemicals requires time, expertise and protective equipment but there is always a residual risk for workers and the environment. But even when treated correctly, these chemicals need to be disposed of properly after use.
And pre-treatments are a significant cost factor. Purchasing, storing, disposal and the extra time and resources needed in the manufacturing process and logistics when using primers should not be underestimated.
With all these challenges bonding to difficult surfaces is facing, it is good to know that there is an alternative.
The alternative we’re talking about in this post is bonding without the need for pre-treatments of surfaces with primers. Primerless bonding tapes allow reliable bonding performance on difficult surfaces with a single and easy to use product.
They are characterized by their excellent adhesion of low-surface energy (LSE) plastics, such as PP-EPDM, to automotive paint systems or medium surface energy (MSE) plastics, such as ABS and ASA, making pre-treatments obsolete in many cases.
Such materials combine functionality with ease of use for secure attachment of protective trims, decorative trims, functional parts and small parts like at the car body, door frame, tailgate or trunk.
With Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) topics becoming increasingly important for the industry, society and the planet, creating better working environments, reducing environmental impacts and at the same time saving time and money underline the importance small parts and changes can have.
Primerless bonding tapes help to streamline automotive manufacturing processes but also provide new ways in customer satisfaction. As bonding tapes can be applied to almost any shape, they allow for maximum freedom of design. In combination with features like noise and vibration dampening, protection and sealing in one product, these tapes help premium manufacturers meet the highest demands of their customers in a single step.
Surface structures are constantly evolving to meet increasing demands and allow for exciting developments in many applications. The flip side of the coin, however, is that creating a reliable bond can become difficult, especially when LSE materials are involved. We have seen that there are new tape technologies existing to solve such challenges and that sometimes small parts can make a big difference.