In this week's episode of Tale of the Tape, Matt Tempelis breaks down the unique characteristics of Silicone PSA tapes.
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 about typical characteristics of silicone pressure sensitive adhesives. Who's excited for this one? Actually, it's pretty pretty cool stuff. Silicone pressure sensitive adhesives come in a variety of tack levels depending on your application. And they have some amazing strengths and some pretty strong weaknesses as well.
Silicone pressure sensitive adhesive strengths include temperature resistance. When I think silicone pressure sensitive tapes, I think two things silicone bonding and temperature resistance. So temperature resistance ranges of -90°F to 500°F and above. At times, they have excellent environmental resistance, UV moisture and chemical resistance. They can bond quite well to many low surface energy substrates, and they are absolutely the best materials for bonding to silicone rubbers, silicone foams and silicone sponge materials. You can get some acrylics to stick to, sponge and to foam. Those silicone rubbers are really tough to bond to.
They are a great electrical insulator and they're often allow for clean removability. So the weaknesses, typically they're lower tack. You're talking about pounds per inch of width, peel 90 degree peel of around 3 pounds. They have the shortest shelf life of around six months. If it's hard to get your tape off its liner and it's a silicone tape, it's running out of shelf life. Typically it's the most expensive category as well. So you got to watch out for some of these weaknesses and be aware of them because they are not for every application, but they have some great uses. One of the applications that we use around here quite a bit is a silicone differential double coat. So you have acrylic on one side, silicone on the other side of this tape.
What we use this for quite often is we'll bond to the silicone rubber here in-house, die, cut the gasket. This silicone differential or this silicone side bonds really well to the silicone. And then our users or our end users can leverage that general purpose acrylic to bond to the substrates at their facility. Silicone transfer tapes are used quite often for high temperature applications. They they will give the highest temperature performance because it's just straight adhesive. And then often times silicone pressure sensitive adhesives will be laminated to other high temperature materials and films to leverage the overall high temperature of the film. So, for example, Kapton® tapes that are manufactured by 3M and others also called Polyamide tapes, Teflon tapes, high temperature foil tapes, for example.
All these leverage. Oh, I forgot about glass cloth tapes. Who didn't remember glass cloth tapes, all these leveraged silicone pressure sensitive adhesives to ensure that you've got great electrical insulation, just like the backing provides, as well as high temperature performance for masking or for bonding or for shielding applications. We use them around here quite a bit. Again, in very special needs and cases, you use silicone pressure sensitive adhesives when you have to, and that is because of the cost typically and the shelf life.
So we've talked a little bit about silicone pressure sensitive adhesive tapes. We're going to be doing a demo bonding silicone acrylic and rubber two to silicone rubber in our next episode to kind of bring the whole pressure sensitive fundamentals, wrap it up into final demo. Pretty exciting stuff. And remember, here at Engineered Materials, we provide more than tape and gasket parts, we make your parts and products better. Thanks.
