In the next episode of Tale of the Tape, Matt Tempelis walks us through rubber based PSAs and their advantages for Engineered Materials customers.
Transcript:
Hello and welcome to another edition of Tale of the Tape. I'm Matt Tempelis, president of Engineered Materials and your minister of tape. Today, I'd like to talk to you a little bit about rubber pressure sensitive adhesives. Rubber pressure sensitive adhesives usually come in two forms. One is natural rubber, the other is synthetic rubber.
Natural rubber is literally pressure sensitive adhesive that comes from rubber tree plants.
Synthetic, on the other hand, are chemical compounds that were developed to have the characteristics of natural rubber, because obviously there's only so many places you can grow rubber tree plants. I believe Malaysia and Indonesia are a couple of the places.
So what are the benefits of these different products?
Rubber pressure sensitive adhesives are known very much for their wet grab and their quick stick. Here I have a product we use quite a bit here on the floor at Engineered Materials to bond to rubber and solid rubber and foam rubber. This is a double coated tape. You have the release liner, you have a polyester carrier, and then pressure sensitive adhesive on each side of the tape. It's super tacky. You can feel it right here. And it loves to bond, to lower surface energy materials or high surface energy materials. You get most of your strength right up front with pressure. Typically about 80% of your full ultimate strength comes with pressure, and just a couple of minutes time, maybe an hour. They're excellent for indoor applications and lighter duty applications.
Often, rubber based adhesives are more affordable than some of the other types of products.
There are some weaknesses to these tapes.
They're not often the strongest of all the adhesive families. Ultimate adhesion sometimes is not at the top of the pyramid when they're exposed to chemicals or UV rays or any sort of humidity or temperature cycles, they can have the tendency to break down.
They also don't have the highest ultimate temperature range. Oftentimes you're talking between 140 and 160°F.
So there are some limitations to rubber based products, but they're great for many uses. You're going to see them on just about every indoor label that you have use in the office. They're used a lot in packaging tapes. We use products like this and some adhesive transfer versions for making many of our gaskets that do not require high temperature resistance or outdoor use. Oftentimes you're using them as a third hand before you screw.
Here's an example of a gasket that's made out of cork solid rubber. So it's a blended cork and rubber. Together we laminate the pressure sensitive adhesive made out of rubber on the back side. It does a nice job of bonding to the rubber and which is not always easy. Rubber can be very difficult to stick to. And and also these products seem to be able to handle the leaching that can happen from some of your lower grade rubbers that allow you to have a competitive gasket but at the same time can break down adhesives. So we use rubber based adhesives all the time at Engineered Materials.
We work with a variety of vendors that focus on rubber based products, and we have a variety of different types that we sell, both for laminating and cutting parts out of our gaskets or also slitting to width for your needs.
So we've talked a little bit about rubber based pressure sensitive adhesive. We will talk in future episodes about acrylic and silicone tapes and do deep dives there At the same time, we're going to talk about the benefits and why you'd use one versus the other down the road.
Remember, at Engineered Materials, we deliver more than just tape and gasket parts. We design improvement, we deliver trust, and we elevate your performance. Thank you and appreciate you listening to Tale of the Tape. And we'll catch you next time.
