Adhesives & Sealants Industry Top Stories

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Today’s urethane product formulators need to meet a wide range of consumer and regulatory requirements. As premium chemistries, reactive adhesives and sealants must be compliant, have good safety and sustainability profiles, and perform exceptionally.

As a vital industrial link between a turbulent oil and gas market and changing consumer needs, the chemical industry has been tested by the COVID-19 pandemic.

By any measure, 2020 has been a difficult year. Indeed, for some, it’s been truly catastrophic. Despite all of the challenges and losses, though, good things have still managed to occur.

Sustainability is an ever-present driver for new products and applications. In pressure-sensitive adhesives (PSAs), sustainability is sometimes an underlying influence in the move from solvent- to emulsion-based products. This is not an option for all applications, however, as solvent-based PSAs give increased performance and processability compared to emulsion PSAs.

In years past, if you wanted to protect, ship, and sell your product, you put it in a can, bottle, or box. Today, packaging comes in all different forms, types, shapes, and sizes. While the options are not necessarily endless, packaging design is limited only by imagination and requirements.

Having a piece of plastic or metal inserted into your body is never going to feel like a warm blanket wrapping around you, but it is possible to make sure that these vital instruments are doing their job while not causing any damage or unnecessary pain in the process. Surface engineering is key for medical devices like tubing, catheters, and stents that are implanted in the human body.

Life during COVID-19 has brought about issues that many of us never envisioned back in early March. On top of innumerable personal challenges, many of our businesses have seen true upheavals. Operating with uncertainty is always difficult, but today’s environment of constant change, ambiguity, and even conflict can lead to especially problematic decision making.

Cashew nutshell liquid (CNSL) is a non-edible, bio-based material commonly used as a building block for various resins, hardeners, and modifiers in the adhesives, coatings, and composites industries. A high-purity cardanol, 3-pentadeca-dienyl-phenol, derived from the bio-oil CNSL has been employed to replace nonyl phenol (NP) in various applications, including isocyanate blocking.

When anticipating using adhesives in structural bonding, a common need is developing the testing protocol to demonstrate bonded system effectiveness. While pressure-sensitive tapes are used in structural joining, this discussion will focus on liquid, paste, and film adhesives in structural joints.