Rubber adhesive

„Rubber“ is a general term for all natural and synthetical caoutchoucs. The rubber, or elastomer, consists of polymers which are connected through vulcanization and adopt elastic characteristics at room temperature. There are a great number of these elastomers and they all can differ in their polymer structure, polarity, and surface properties. This makes elastomers and rubber so difficult to bond.

Elastomeric substrates are often bonded with solvent-based adhesives or with cyanoacrylates. Cyanoacrylates offer an easy bonding solution, but have decisive drawbacks: They embrittle quickly and exhibit a very low impact strength. Solvents and solvent evaporation can be hazardous in the workplace. This makes solvents an undesirable method for bonding rubber.

Panacol has developed UV curing acrylic adhesives, which are specially formulated to bond caoutchoucs. UV curing acrylates are solvent-free, easy to dispense, and are easily integrated into existing production processes. They cure within seconds under UV or visible light and are therefore the perfect choice for high volume production in manual or automated production lines. Bondlines are invisible, and the rubber adhesives demonstrate excellent bond strength on a great variety of elastomer blends. To avoid stress cracks the adhesive should feature the same elastomeric characteristics as the substrates to be bonded. Due to their high flexibility, these acrylic adhesives from Panacol are very well suited to bond rubber, latex, and a wide variety of other dissimilar substrates.
 

Two elastomeric substrates are bonded with an elastic UV adhesive.