Liquid Adhesive Converts to a Hot Melt When Heated
In essence, expensive and hard-to-maintain hot melt systems can be replaced with two simple components — a heat exchanger and a heated dispensing head. Fusion melting of the liquid adhesive occurs in an environment sealed from atmospheric oxygen, so oxidative degradation is eliminated. The first-in, first-out flow characteristics of an in-line heat exchanger minimize the time the adhesive is exposed to melt temperature, so thermal degradation is greatly reduced. These two factors make adhesive char and nozzle plugging very unlikely. The costs of line downtime caused by char-plugged nozzles are very high, but so are the manpower and spare-parts costs necessary to avoid them.