Gone are the boiled entrails of yesteryear, modern adhesives are high tech. They often out-perform welding, soldering and riveting for industrial assembly and provide faster and cheaper repairs out in the field.
For those still using older methods, here are six benefits of industrial bonding with adhesives.
Stress distribution
Materials connected with a screw, bolt or rivet, concentrate shear forces on the fastener. This risks wear or a catastrophic failure. Substrates bonded across a broad area have no stress focal points: the result is a stronger safer bond.
Adhesive manufacturers will help you calculate the stresses from their data sheets, or even help you test your solution in a laboratory. For example see https://www.ametektest.com/learningzone/testtypes/adhesion-testing.
Gap filling
Gaps sometimes exist by design, and sometimes despite it. In either case, there are adhesives for the task. Unlike other solutions, adhesives come with a choice of qualities; they can be electrically insulating or conductive, retain heat or disperse it. In electronics “potting” uses adhesives for these reasons. Friable or function critical components can be braced and protected from heat, cold, charge, vibration, impact or chemical attack using adhesive fillers.
Sealing
Many adhesives make excellent sealants. Often you can bond and seal using the same product – a cost and convenience bonus. You can eliminate gaskets, o-rings and washers from your designs, saving time, money and mistakes.
Adhesives are available to seal and shore-up threaded components, or the crimp seals used in things like oil and gas filters.
Similar and dissimilar substrates
Soldering and welding usually restrict you to identical materials. Welds between different plastics or metals rarely work out well, let alone between plastic and metal.
There are now adhesives to join almost any substrates. Adhesives used to have the opposite problem – it was difficult to join metals together. That has completely changed, with exciting new products like the metal bonding adhesive CT1 (http://www.ct1ltd.com/product-applications/metal-to-metal-adhesive/).
Unobtrusive
On many production lines it is necessary to clean up things like burrs and weld burns before products can be finished, packed and dispatched. This entails delays, costs and aesthetic compromises.
Protruding bolt or rivet heads pose problems for designers. Adhesives open up new possibilities which may be easier to produce and better looking.
Automation
Curing times aren’t the obstacle they once were. Many adhesives are incorporated into automated and fully robotic assembly lines.
