As the advantages of structural epoxy adhesives become more apparent, new curing agent technologies can help facilitate a more sustainable adhesive product.
Increasingly important to industrial manufacturing in recent years, structural adhesives offer a strong, cost-effective, and fast joining technology. Automotive, aircraft manufacturing, shipbuilding, electronics, and the construction sectors have all benefited from the recent technical developments in adhesive bonding technology. Lightweight and multi-material designs, progressive integration and miniaturization, as well as increasing complexity have created a steady rise in the technical requirements placed on components and bonding processes.
Structural bonding offers practical advantages over material-locking, force-fitting, and other positive-locking joining processes. For example, it enables the bonding of material composites and composite materials consisting of dissimilar materials, such as metals, polymers, glass, ceramics, or low thickness, that were not previously achievable with other joining processes (or only at a significant disadvantage). Further advantages of adhesive bonding include homogeneous stress distribution or stress compensation by two-dimensional force transmission, the possibility of compensating component tolerances, and the additional function of seal and corrosion protection as well as vibration damping. Despite some challenges such as lower thermal resistance and the issue of de-bonding or instant strength, structural bonding has now become the preferred solution for many bonding and manufacturing processes across multiple market applications.