Archive for Adhesives and Adhesion
Surface Wetting and Pretreatment Methods
By Scott Sabreen, The Sabreen Group Plastics adhesion problems are widespread throughout the industry. A major contributing factor to these problems is that many plastics have chemically inert and nonporous surfaces with low surface tensions. That is, most plastics are hydrophobic and are not naturally wettable. These properties, although advantageous to the design engineer, often [...]
Solving the Problems of Plastics Adhesion
By Scott Sabreen Problems arising from polymeric adhesion bonding are pervasive throughout the plastics industry. Two-dimensional and three dimensional products often require bonding plastic-to-plastic, plastic-to-metal, plastic-to-composite, and so on. In addition to adhesives (epoxies, urethanes, acrylics, silicones, etc.), adhesion bonding applications include adhesion of printing inks, paints and coatings, encapsulants, potting compounds, metallization, and more. [...]
Cold Gas Plasma Surface Modification – Optimize Plastics Bonding Adhesion
By Scott R. Sabreen, The Sabreen Group, Inc. Polymeric and elastomeric substrates often can be extremely challenging to achieve robust bonding adhesion strength to like or dissimilar materials. Bonding applications are not limited to only adhesives, but include printing inks, paints and coatings, encapsulant and potting compounds, metallization and more. This article describes “Low Pressure [...]
Flame Plasma Pretreatment Improves Adhesion of Polymers
By Joseph DiGiacomo and Scott R. Sabreen Adhesion problems are widespread throughout the plastics industry and are increasing as metal components are being replaced by advanced engineering polymers. Many plastics have chemically inert and nonporous surfaces with low surface tensions that make bonding difficult. Most plastics are hydrophobic and are not naturally wettable. Surface pretreatments [...]
Preparing Plastics for Painting
By Scott Sabreen, The Sabreen Group The processes used to apply most liquid paints to plastics are not much different than those employed or painting metals, although powdercoating is still quite unusual on plastics. Additionally, certain specific painting methods widely used on metals, such as chemical deposition (autophoretic) and electro-deposition coating, are not possible with [...]
