|
|
Did you realize that, everywhere you go, something is sticking to something else? In your house, in your car, at your job, in the grocery store, at your favorite restaurant, at the airport, at the swim club, even at the dentist!
What makes things stick together? Adhesives! Not the white glue you used for school projects. But many kinds of adhesives, each one designed for a specific kind of sticky job! Because sometimes you need super sticking power — when you're dealing with airplane parts, for example. And sometimes you need just a little — like the kind used on pressure-sensitive name tags so your clothes don't tear when you remove the tag!
Chances are good that many of the products you use every day are stuck together with Rohm and Haas adhesives. And some of these products are developed at the company's Spring House Research Laboratories or manufactured at the Bristol plant. Spring House is one of the company's eight product development locations, and Bristol is one of 23 Rohm and Haas plants that make adhesive products.
Traditionally, Rohm and Haas has been a raw materials supplier to the adhesives industry. This means that Rohm and Haas chemicals are used to produce a final end-use product such as adhesives for floor coverings, food packaging and pressure sensitive tapes.
When the company acquired Morton Salt in 1999, its line of adhesive and sealant products significantly expanded to include ready to use adhesives for a wide variety of applications such as specialty labels, flexible packaging materials and interior car trim to name just a few.
Now Rohm and Haas has a $700 million adhesives and sealants business, a growing force in this $22 billion industry. The company makes adhesives that hold together the bag of potato chips you ate for lunch, the dashboard in your car and even your garage door...adhesives that make labels stick to shampoo bottles, food cans and envelopes...sealants that hold together airplanes and prevent swimming pools from leaking. Adhesives are even found in the dental material used to make molds of your teeth! Rohm and Haas produces adhesives for five primary markets.
Packaging & Converting
Rohm and Haas products include adhesives for paper film and foil lamination such as those used for blister packs of pills and candy wrappers. This type of packaging often contains several layers of material — called substrates — that must stick together. If you tear open a bag of instant mashed potatoes, for example, you may see that the bag has two layers — foil and paper. An adhesive holds these layers together.
Other products in this group are coatings, primers and other specialties for flexible packaging and graphic arts. Some coatings, for example, make it possible for ink to adhere to film and foil packaging materials such as those used for snack foods, coffee pouches and medical supplies.
Pressure Sensitive Adhesives (PSA)
Rohm and Haas is the top supplier of specialty chemicals to the pressure-sensitive adhesives industry. The company's products are used to manufacture a wide variety of ready-to-use adhesives, ready-to-formulate adhesive polymers, and additives for different types of PSA applications: decals, film labels, specialty labels and tapes, industrial tapes and carton-sealing tapes.
Industrial Lamination
These flexible and structural adhesives are used for heavy-duty applications such as:
- Insulated doors. For example, adhesives bind together the foam board and aluminum parts of your garage door.
- Prefabricated housing. These are modular components that are assembled into the final housing unit on site.
- Insulation and cable wrap. Your computer's cable wire is wrapped with film and foil material bound with adhesives. And adhesives are used to fasten insulation to the electrical wiring in your house.
- Solar window film to reduce heat loss.
- High performance racing sails such as those used for the Americas Cup Race.
- Sound damping to reduce noise in firewalls and car wheel wells.
- Anti-static film packaging for computer chips and other electronic components.
Transportation
Rohm and Haas produces three types of adhesives used in the transportation industry:
- Automotive Adhesives. The Mor-Trim™ adhesive series is used for interior automotive trim, door panels, instrument panels and headliners. These adhesives bond together foams, fiberglass, fabrics, metals and plastics.
- Release Agents. The Polymold™ series is used for interior automotive trim. It includes agents for releasing molded parts formed from sprayed polyurethane foam.
Construction
For the construction industry, Rohm and Haas provides:
- Polysulfide Sealants. These polymers are used in manufacturing insulated glass, construction sealants and aircraft sealants. They have excellent chemical resistance and outdoor durability. Thermal windows at your office, for example, may be sealed with this type of adhesive to hold in gases that control the flow of hot and cold air across the glass.
- Polymers for Adhesives and Sealants. Manufacturers of floor covering, panel and contact adhesives use Rohm and Haas acrylic polymers to make their products.
- Rubber Auxiliaries. These adhesives are used in automotive seals, gaskets, coils and anti-vibration parts. They bond rubbers and elastomers (polymer with the elastic quality of rubber) to metal and plastic. Many "under the hood" and chassis parts in your car involve bonding rubber to metal.
Looking Ahead
Rohm and Haas continually studies ways to improve the quality of life through chemistry and new products. New adhesive products on the horizon could include:
- Safety film lamination for windows to protect against hurricanes, bomb blasts and other disasters.
- Adhesive material for hail-resistant shingles. Waste tires are recycled into finely ground rubber to make this material.
- Auto fuel system coatings that are resistant to fuel migration, resulting in lower fuel emissions and a cleaner environment.
- New environmentally friendly solid adhesives such as reactive hot melts and adhesives supplied in film form for bonding fabrics.
- Acrylics for bonding flexible packaging laminates.
- Energy curable adhesives which increase our customers' production rates and eliminate emissions of solvents.
Sticky scientific challenges
Scientists face a variety of challenges in developing adhesives. Each product must be formulated to meet different requirements, depending on the end use. Adhesives used for airplanes must be fuel resistant. Those used to affix product labels to shampoo bottles must dry clear so consumers can read the back of the label. Some adhesives must have outdoor durability, others must be safe for food packaging. Here are a few of the many challenges Rohm and Haas scientists have met:
Food Packaging Adhesives. Some adhesives are made with chemicals called monomers. Monomers can migrate through food packaging to the food product, such as potato chips or chocolate bars, if the product is packaged too quickly. Until recently, the only way to avoid the problem was to cure the adhesive material for up to 40 days. However, this long lead time caused a serious logistical disadvantage for food manufacturers.
A team of Rohm and Haas scientists responded by developing a new product, ELM (Extremely Low Monomer), a solvent-free adhesive with an extremely low monomer content. By significantly decreasing the monomer content, they reduced the curing time to five days and eliminated the migration problem.
Aircraft Sealants have rigorous performance requirements. They include:
Excellent fuel resistance. Some aircraft parts are totally immersed in jet fuel for many years.
Good temperature performance. Adhesives must stand up to rapid temperature changes from the ground where it may be 90 degrees F to the stratosphere where it's -65 degrees F. In addition, the extremely fast flight speed of military jets causes the leading edge of the jet wings to get so hot they glow!
Water resistance. This is important because rapid temperature changes cause condensation in the fuel tanks.
Polysulfide sealants developed by Rohm and Haas meet all these requirements. Scientists are currently working to enhance polysulfide temperature performance even further with a goal of 60,000 hours at 400 degrees F!
Printing on flexible film packaging. Foil pouches for coffee and medical supplies and packaging for food products like Slim Jims™ must be coated with a layer of laminating adhesive before product information can be printed on the flexible polyester film. The printing ink adheres to the laminated surface. In addition, the laminating adhesive must dry clear so consumers can read the information. Rohm and Haas produces Mor-Ester®, a polyester resin laminating adhesive specially formulated for this purpose.
|
|
