Henkel Best Use of Adhesives Award

By: Rudolf Neumayer

Designing and calculating components with traditional materials and joining technologies is the standard in industry. Looking at bonding technologies there are mainly two opinions existing: One statement is: Bonding is widely used in non technical applications, like tapes or super glue in household applications with mixed experience. Therefore in the eyes of those people bonding is temporarily and not reliable. The other group of people states that bonding is a very high sophisticated science used in high tech applications like in aircrafts.

In reality bonding is an established joining technology in industry. There is no industry which doesn’t use the advantages of this technology. Of course, there is no “All Purpose Adhesive” existing, but a lot of different adhesive families are offered like epoxies, acrylics, polyurethanes etc. with special grades for a variety of applications.

Motor sport is an ideal playground for the bonding technology. There are a lot of different materials, which have to be joined with very demanding requirements. Our experience from Formula one or Rally Dakar and our close cooperation with Porsche Motorsport in racings proves that correctly selected and used adhesives in properly designed joints can help to overcome design problems or realize new ideas in order to be ahead of competition. Formula Student is an innovation platform in Motor sports with enthusiastic and creative engineers where new technologies and materials are welcome

Henkel Adhesive Technologies with its brands Loctite and Teroson is the world leading supplier of high tech adhesives and adhesive engineering. Therefore we want to offer an award for the “Best use of adhesives”.

The target of this award is to find the team leveraging bonding technology best.

How can you apply for the award?

You have to deliver 2 Application Case Histories.

One has to be an application in the power train, like bonding cylindrical part for high load transmission or sealing parts of the engine or...

The other one has to describe an application related to the body of the car, like bonding fiber reinforced plastics with high tech epoxies or MS-Polymers or bonding metal parts with acrylics or...

Those two applications have to be described in detail and documented with photos. The description has to cover the following topics:

• Challenge:
  Describe the application, the materials used, and the design/geometry of the bondline.
• Requirement specification:
  Write down the requirement specification regarding strength, temperature resistance short term and long term, chemical and environmental resistance (like resistant against ATF...), ...
• Adhesive selection:
  Describe why you have selected the specific adhesive for this application in the following way that you name the properties why you have selected the adhesive and which advantage you gained. E.g. :Property: Room Temperature Cure – Advantage: no need for additional energy or heat.
• Bonding:
  Describe preparation of the bonding surfaces (Cleaning, abrading, ….).
• How you applied the adhesive (on which of the parts, how much, in beads or spread over the whole surface…
• How you cured the adhesive (by heat, mixing 2 components, humidity…)
• Testing:
  Have you done preliminary tests? If so, what did you test and how did you test?

The whole description of one Application (without photos) should not exceed 2 pages. The number of photos supporting your description is up to you.

You can increase your score, if you add more bonding applications:
These applications can be other body or power train applications or other applications of any kind, not only on the car, but also from the periphery. For these additional Applications you only need a photo + short description of the application and the adhesive you have chosen (max: ½ page A4 per application incl. photo).

This multipage-pdf should not exceed 10 MB.

Please submit your applications by July 15th, 2009  13:00 CET at latest on the page
“Team Deadlines” (=> MyTeam => Events => Deadlines).

We are looking forward getting testimonials of your creativity and professionalism.

A selection of 8 teams will be receiving the possibility to give a presentation on Thursday, the 6th of August.

Henkel Adhesive Technologies

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