How Adhesives Are Keeping Your Car Together

Flexible, powerful bonding solutions play an essential role in the manufacturing processes for vehicles. By relying on adhesives instead of other joining methods, manufacturers produce cars that are lighter, more fuel-efficient, and made up of more varied components. Using adhesives also leads to fewer emissions produced throughout the process.

Use of Adhesives in the Automotive Industry

Adhesives are on the rise in manufacturing processes compared to traditional joining techniques like welding. In some vehicles, there are up to forty pounds of adhesive materials. This weight is just a fraction of the rivets, welding agents, and other heavy metal equipment that could be used in traditional processes and designs.

By exchanging metal parts for adhesives, manufacturers can create cars that weigh less. Through that single change, cars offer a higher mileage rating, while manufacturers lower their environmental footprint.

One popular adhesive material is double-sided bonding tape. Its benefits include:

• Shear strength:This prevents the bonded materials from failing in shear or sliding apart in a direction parallel to stress. Double-sided adhesive tape has shear strength that prevents most failures or gradual slippage.
• Strong adhesion:This material sticks to a variety of surfaces without failing. It can bind together two unlike materials, such as plastics and metals, which cannot be welded together.
• Low weight:Its lighter weight means it can replace several pounds of welding and joining materials while still offering superior performance.
• Temperature resistance:Both commercial and consumer vehicles face a wide range of internal and environmental temperatures. Adhesives can withstand low and high temperatures without losing strength once the bond is set.
• Biodegradability:Just as car manufacturers face increased pressure to create fuel-efficient vehicles, they also must consider other environmental costs. Many adhesive products, such as double-sided bonding tape, is biodegradable.

Due to these advantages, manufacturers prefer using adhesives compared to welding. Welding adds significant weight to the vehicle and is an expensive process. Welding stations require a lot of specialized equipment and raw materials, and the costs for the process in terms of time and labor is high. Adhesives, on the other hand, can quickly be applied whether it’s by a team of manufacturers or automated lines.

While automotive adhesives can be used during any stage of the manufacturing process, they are most commonly applied during the body in white (BIW) state, which is when the sheet metal body of the car is being pieced together. According to the Automotive Adhesives Market forecast in 2015, this stage of the process represents the greatest use of adhesives. Further, this area of application will be the highest growing area of adhesives usage through 2021.

Automotive manufacturers prefer to use double-sided tapes and other adhesives during the BIW stage because of the characteristics listed above, especially the reduction in weight. As double-sided adhesives become stronger and more diverse, they are quickly replacing most applications of metal fasteners and pins. They also allow for more varied designs and innovations. Adhesives designers and manufacturers will play a critical role in the evolution of vehicles as they create, support, and test specialized adhesives.

Because adhesives can bond unlike materials, demand for mild steel will also continue to drop in favor of low-alloy steels that no longer need to withstand welding and heat distortion. Other materials that will grow more popular include aluminum, magnesium, and plastics. These changes will become more apparent throughout the next decade as vehicle composition changes to support demands for lower weight, greater fuel efficiency, and smarter design.