In this week's episode of Tale of the Tape, Matt Tempelis breaks down the unique characteristics of Silicone PSA Demonstration.
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've got an exciting demo that we're going to do. We are going to see what, four different tapes, what kind of bonds that they have to silicone rubber. So what we did is we took those four different pressure sensitive adhesives. We bonded them to six inch long by one inch wide aluminum foil. This is two mil aluminum foil. We use three inches of tape. And that way we can really get a good 90 degree peel force. We used a tape wipe to make the bonds. We made sure that silicone was talc free and clean. We let the bonds sit for over 72 hours. We wanted to make sure that they were at full strength. Silicone as well as acrylic adhesives take some time to get to full strength, even with pressure.
So with pressure you get very good strength out of the gates, but you do build additional strength over time. We used a general purpose double coat, acrylic tape, a low surface energy bonding, double coated acrylic tape. We used a synthetic rubber based, double coated tape and then a differential silicone acrylic double coated tape. We have, of course, made sure that the silicone PSA was bonded to that silicone rubber and that the acrylic was bonded to the aluminum foil. We want to see the difference that these bonds show just by hand with a typical 90 degree peel.
So why don't we go to the demo? All right. Let's take a look at how that general purpose 3M double coated acrylic adhesive works on the silicone rubber. Wow. That comes right off. And we're going to do the second of the bonds we made. Comes right off. Almost no tack at all. All right. Next up is a 3M, double coated, low surface energy acrylic product. Let's see how that does. About the same as the other acrylic. So not a huge difference there. Comes right off. Maybe just a hair more bond, but it's hard to tell just from a hand peel. Let's take a look at the synthetic double coated, rubber based adhesive. Not much difference there either. Comes right off the rubber pretty easily. Lastly, we're going to take a look at that differential double coat with the silicone bonded to the silicone rubber, the acrylic bonded to the aluminum foil.
Okay. Now suddenly, we have a bond here. Ladies and gentlemen, this is exciting. Holy moly. That wants to really grab that silicone. We're going to do the next one. Just to show that it's no fluke. Boy, that's bonding quite well. And that, again, is just with a clean and making sure there's no talc on that silicone that is with no real surface prep beyond that. So it looks like nothing worked other than that differential double coat. So what did we learn with this demo? Well, we learned it is possible to bond to silicone rubber. We also learned that it's very difficult. So you're going to want to use, like we did in this demonstration, a silicone pressure sensitive adhesive that is designed to stick to silicone rubbers.
And pretty much anything else would need some severe surface modification, like a primer step to get a bond to. So luckily, we have that differential double coat that provides silicone on one side, that acrylic on the other side, and allows you to have the best of both worlds. Remember, at Engineered Materials, we are the 3M preferred converter. We'll see you next time on Tale of the Tape.
