Epoxy Adhesive Technology

Epoxy adhesives form strong and durable bonds to a wide range of materials such as metals, glass, concrete, ceramics, wood, and many plastics. Curing shrinkage is low. Cured epoxy resin possesses strong and rigid cross-linked chemical structure well-suited for various bonding applications. Epoxy adhesives have been widely used as typical reactive adhesives for various applications ranging from general industry, construction, electronics assembly, automobile production to aerospace and defense market. Typical conventional room temperature and thermal cure epoxy adhesives need long cure time. High performance epoxy adhesives usually require curing at high temperature conditions. Most cured epoxy adhesives are rigid and are not suitable for bonding flexible substrates. Considerable research and development efforts have been devoted to overcome these limitations and significant progress has been achieved in thermal low temperature cure epoxy adhesive development, thermal snap cure epoxy bonding technology development, UV cationic cure epoxy adhesive development, UV and thermal dual cure hybrid epoxy adhesive development, and high-performance toughened epoxy adhesive development. In the meantime, sustainable epoxy adhesive development has become increasingly important to meet the expectations from global environmental protection, government regulation restriction, and customer requirements. Latest developments and new trends in various epoxy adhesive technologies are described.