Adhesives & Sealants Industry Top Stories

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Acrylate and silicone have dominated the medical adhesives market for years. However, the adhesives currently available often require device engineers to choose between strength and wear duration, or comfort and pliability.

Producers focus on minimizing waste, reducing costs, increasing product quality, and maximizing plant efficiency. Wasted efforts are certainly a drain on resources, in addition to wasted product, creating the need to evaluate and implement lean manufacturing principles.

Looking ahead, sustainable packaging represents an important opportunity for the print and paper industry. This comes as consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies increasingly seek to make their products more sustainable, along with the packaging they use.

Better resistance to UV, abrasion, scratching, and impact. Better adhesion and improved properties for water-based formulation. The demands on today’s coatings, adhesives, sealants, and elastomers (CASE) create a long list of desirable properties for feedstocks.

I have worked with companies that manufacture superglue and polyurethane glue, both of which are single-component, no-mix adhesives. Superglue, which is the common term for cyanoacrylate adhesive, has been around for about 60 years. In contrast, the polyurethanes are about 20 years old in the retail market and somewhat older in professional woodworking. I admit to using both types of adhesive regularly.

The global adhesives and sealants market grew from approximately $45 billion in 2010 to around $63 billion last year, according to The Adhesive and Sealant Council’s recently released “2020-2023 North American Market Report for Adhesives and Sealants, with a Global Overview.” During this period, over 200 patent applications (simple family groups) in the technical fields of adhesives and sealants were filed across the five major IP jurisdictions (US, EU, CN, JP, KR).

Have you ever run your hot-melt tank above the adhesive manufacturer’s recommended operating temperature? Did someone on the line ever forget to turn the equipment off at the end of the day? What about drips on the tank lid, or that one spot on the nozzle that always seems to collect buildup?

In the last Pressure Sensitive Tape Council (PSTC) “Tape Talk” column and recent ASI Insider video, we discussed a number of topics, including our plans for Tape Week 2021, our adjusted strategy in light of the ongoing public health emergency, and the results of our record-attended Fall Member Business Meeting. Suffice to say, a lot has changed since then.

As part of a collaborative project focusing on coatings and joining systems for lightweight materials, the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) Army Research Laboratory (ARL) tasked PPG to develop a high-strength, highly ductile structural adhesive to meet the requirements of the U.S. Department of Defense’s (DoD) test method standard MIL-PRF-32662, Tier I-III specification. MIL-PRF-32662 incorporates a decade of rigorous research efforts to statistically correlate the complex ballistic response of adhesively bonded armor assemblies to universally translatable and commercially relevant quasi-static mechanical properties.

The global pandemic has accelerated demand for manufactured goods of many types, as consumers stay home and manufacturers continue to operate as essential businesses.