As a follow up from the previous episode, Matt Tempelis does a similar demonstration, this time using a PE material instead of stainless.
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 we are going to have an exciting demo episode.
Last week we talked about acrylic pressure, sensitive adhesives, the broad category. Today we are going to do a demo with acrylic pressure sensitive adhesives. So last week I made up two panels, one with a high surface energy material, a stainless steel, the next with a very low surface energy material poly. This is a medium density polyethylene panel.
I took four different acrylic pressure sensitive adhesive tapes that I'll talk to you in just a second about. I laminated first those different tapes onto a six inch by one inch, two mil thick aluminum foil. Then I laminated three inches of the tape to that foil. After I had made those bonds, I peeled the backing off of here and I bonded those to the panel. I made sure the panels were clean. And I also put good tape wipe pressure onto the substrates, made sure we had great bonds. They've now been sitting for over a week. Typically, the bond strength, acrylic pressure, sensitive adhesives will gain strength over time. 72 hours, you're usually talking about very close to 100% strength. Each one of these tapes is a five mil tape except for one.
Let’s get to the demo and see if there's a visible difference between the various tape bonds and a polyethylene panel. We have the exact same four tapes here. We have the firm, high strength acrylic. We have a hot melt, general purpose acrylic. We have a solvent general purpose, acrylic that's high-tack. And then we have a low surface energy bonding acrylic. I think we'll see in this demonstration that there's quite a difference between the peel strength, the 90 degree peel strength of these various tapes.
So we are going to start with the firm acrylic pressure sensitive tape, bonded to polyethylene. And as you can see right there, that bond came off without hardly any pressure and any pull from from me.
Here is the hot melt, general purpose adhesive. I can hear some bond, but it comes off in fits and starts relatively easily. But it definitely bonded a lot better than the firm acrylic.
Now we have the solvent acrylic. That bond is quite a bit better than the other two. It is bonding quite well, but of course still coming off.
And then we have the low surface energy bonding product, an acrylic that's designed to bond, to polyethylene and polypropylene. That's a very good bond and it's probably the best that we've seen. And it does come up with some considerable force.
So as we can tell, we definitely had a difference between the acrylics on this low surface energy material. The firm product didn't bond at all. The hot melt acrylic bonded okay. I definitely wouldn't take it to the bank. The solvent acrylic did outperform and then, of course, the low surface energy bond, which is also a hot melt, bonded quite well.
Hopefully this demonstration helped to show that depending on the substrate, depending on the application, you need to specify different tapes. In this case, with low surface energy polyethylene, you definitely want to be careful and choose the right tape for the job.
Thank you for watching this episode of Tale of the Tape. Remember at Engineered Materials, we don't just make parts, we make solutions that improve your products. Thanks and have a great day.
