In the next episode of Tale of the Tape, Matt Tempelis walks us through different categories of PSAs and their advantages for Engineered Materials customers.
Transcript:
Hello and welcome to Tale of the Tape. I'm Matt Tempelis, president of Engineered Materials and your Minister of tape. Today, I'd like to talk briefly about what types of categories of pressure sensitive adhesive tapes there are available. On previous episodes, we've already talked about what is a pressure sensitive adhesive, what types of pressure sensitive adhesives are there and what are the advantages of pressure sensitive adhesive tapes.
Today, I'd like to talk briefly about what types of categories of pressure sensitive adhesive tapes there are available. Around here at Engineered Materials we use a lot of pressure sensitive adhesive, adhesive transfer tapes, and double coated thin bonding tapes.
Adhesive transfer tape is a thin layer of adhesive, usually 2 to 5 mils of adhesive onto a release liner. We typically use this to laminate to one of our materials that are common on our floor, for example, a blended neoprene rubber. And then we can either slit that to width, we can die cut it to shape, and now you have a pressure sensitive adhesive foam tape that wasn't in existence before we put it on our laminating machines.
Double coated thin tapes, we also use quite a bit. They're very similar to adhesive transfer tapes, except for they're a thin layer of pressure sensitive adhesive on a carrier. That carrier oftentimes is a thin, let's call it a 0.5 mil polyester. Sometimes it can be out of other materials like paper or other thin plastic films.
Very common and familiar to many is double coated foam tapes. Those can be from things that are removable like 3M command strips. That's a pressure sensitive adhesive laminated to each side of a polyethylene foam all the way to something super strong like 3M VHB products, which are acrylic foam tapes that can replace rivets and welding and liquid adhesives in mechanical bonds.
We make a lot of single coated foam tapes here on site by taking a laminating adhesive and adding a foam, laminating those together, and then cutting or slitting to shape. You can have custom single coated foam tapes for sealing and gasketing to meet your need, and we can make those custom here.
There's also a myriad of specialty single coated tapes:
PTFE or Teflon tapes with silicone pressure sensitive adhesives for very high temperature applications
Kapton tapes or also known as polyimide tapes for high temperature applications
Slick surface tapes like UHMW tapes.
The single coated tape realm is a wide, wide range of products as well. These are just some of the examples of pressure sensitive tapes in use. You can visit our website to learn a lot more about those or give us a call, and we thank you for your time at Tale of the Tape. And remember, Engineered Materials, we are the 3M Preferred Converter.
