Adhesive Types and Structural Bonding Characterization

Effective research, technological progress, cutting-edge technical achievements and marketing initiatives have brought adhesives into everyday life.

Collage was already well known in ancient Egypt, when papyrus sheets were joined together to form a writing scroll (Department of Egyptian Antiquities, Musée du Louvre), and was the ancestor of the book form until the 2nd century A.D., before the arrival of the codex and then the present-day book, before the advent of the codex, then the present-day book, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries it has seen the greatest expansion in modern assembly technologies: there is no technical field that can ignore the importance of collage assembly.

Paper, cardboard, fabrics, leather, plastics, wood, metals and minerals now have countless new applications thanks to bonding.

The aerospace industry, as the forerunner of technological progress, used its authority to pave the way for the entire construction industry.

The first applications of steel bonding date back to the early 1970s, and are now booming despite a strong tradition of welding and mechanical assembly.

The development of adhesives with improved mechanical properties, adapted to the materials used, has given rise to a multitude of industrial applications, and rightly so, bonding occupies a prominent place among the most modern assembly techniques.

The article presented in the semi-finished products section of this treatise concerns structural adhesive bonding applied to assemblies where the modulus of elasticity of the substrates is high in relation to that of the adhesive polymer. Adhesive products (or glues) of animal or plant origin are not a priori taken into account.

To analyze and predict the behavior of a bonded assembly of this type, there is as yet no single theory capable of interpreting the phenomena involved in bonding, nor a synthesis approach integrating the choice of designs, products and processes.

Particular attention is paid to the intrinsic study of the adhesive and the single-lap bonded joint under tensile-shear stress. In particular, these elements enable us to study adhesion and resistance phenomena in hot and humid environments, with a view to optimizing the design of bonded joints to guarantee the durability appreciated by manufacturers in particular.

The aim of this article is to define the main structural adhesives in use today, and to determine a reproducible procedure for setting up and characterizing test specimens, in order to identify the fundamental parameters linked to the substrate, coating and adhesive that determine stress resistance values.

...