The next episode of Tale of the Tape is here! Matt Tempelis walks through an overview on the uses and benefits of acrylic pressure sensitive adhesive tapes.
Transcript:
Hello and welcome to another episode of Tale of the Tape. I'm Matt Tempelis, president of Engineered Materials and your Minister of Tape. Today I'd like to spend a little time talking about acrylic pressure sensitive tapes. We'll take a couple of different episodes to dig into acrylics because they're such a broad category. They provide the widest range of performance characteristics of all the pressure sensitive tapes. So that's why we'll spend a little time with them. Due to the ability to modify the properties of acrylic pressure sensitive tapes, they can be designed with very low tack levels, with very high tack levels. You can make them completely repositionable or removable like a Post-it™ note adhesive. They can absolutely have very high temperature performance, up to 450 degrees sometimes, and they can have very, very strong bonds. So amazing ability to modify the acrylic adhesive into characteristics that you need for your application requirements.
If you just talk about generalities:
They're going to provide the best strength of all the pressure sensitive tapes.
They're going to provide some of the best temperature performances and very, very sound temperature performances, short range, short run, ranging from about 250 or in some cases, up to 450 degrees. There's even some tapes that are up to 500 degrees short term.
They provide a wide application range and they're great for environmental resistance for UV, humidity, heat. These sorts of things acrylic PSAs are terrific at withstanding.
There's just a ton of, thousands, in fact, of pressure sensitive tapes that are made out of acrylic PSA. However, I kind of bucketize them in about three, three and a half types of Categories.
First, would be your high performance tapes. These are going to be very strong shear, Overlap Shear, very strong peel. They're going to have temperature resistance of upwards of 450 degrees, and they're typically going to bond really well to metals, to higher surface energy plastics, but as soon as you get into more difficult to stick to materials like some paints and some plastics, they're not going to perform quite as well. They're not going to bond quite as well, frankly.
Then you have your general purpose category. These are modified acrylics that are going to be quite a bit stickier to the touch. They're going to bond to 90% of your substrates. Typically, they're going to have very good heat performance up to 250°F. And of course, like most acrylic adhesives, they're going to be great outdoors.
Next, you have your low surface energy bonding tapes. These are literally formulated to meet the area of challenge that acrylics always struggled with, which is doing what rubber based tapes do - bond to everything. So these tapes bond very well to polypropylene, polyethylene and other low surface energy materials. So they're very highly tackified, very sticky tapes, and they still have great temperature performance, outdoor performance. So that's that's terrific.
Lastly, we kind of have a specialty category that I call, you know, any anything that's super modified into being repositionable or removable. Tapes that bond and can resist plasticizers that you see in PVC, flexible PVC, for example. Those those are your specialty category. And again, just because you can do just about anything with those acrylic adhesives, you can get them to to be removable or reposition them.
The applications of acrylic pressure sensitive adhesives are wide - nameplates, decorative trim, outdoor gasketing, window muntin bars, car molding, even panels on truck trailers. Here's a great example of an acrylic foam tape. It's a 3M™ VHB product that some of you may or may not have heard of. It can replace rivets, mechanical fasteners, bolts and adhesives and metal and plastic bonds. So very, very high strength, as you can see from the trying to bend these I-beams. Here's some examples of where we've die cut it to shape for easy application. The best thing about it is it's also creates a complete seal, as you can see here from this hockey puck.
Acrylic pressure sensitive adhesives are great tapes and you can find one that would meet your application requirements without question. So in the future, you can just give us a call and we can help you with those requirements. Remember, at Engineered Materials, we are your 3M Preferred Converter. Thanks and have a great day.
