Hot Melt News

Pressure sensitive adhesion performances (for tape and label applications) often change during long-term storage after hot melt pressure sensitive adhesives (HMPSA) are coated on a specific face stock such as paper, film, non-woven, or cloth. Most formulators and users believe that the change of performance is primarily caused by the aging of adhesive during manufacturing, processing, and/or storage. Besides the aging effect, in fact, one of the major causes results from the mating of HMPSA and face stock that is used. Read Article >>

Effect of face stocks on hot melt pressure sensitive adhesion - by Pierce Covert, Glue Machinery Corporation

Hot tack is a term relating to the ability of hot melt adhesives (HMA) to hold substrates together prior to solidification or set.

…Most adhesive formulators must perform lots of trial and error evaluations in order to qualitatively determine the strength of hot tack of HMAs on specific substrates. The test result is greatly temperature, speed, and substrate dependent. The reported test result is normally subjective but not accurate. To precisely compare hot tack performances of different HMAs, it may be more effective to carry out rheological evaluations based on a temperature or time scan for an adhesive from molten stage to solid stage. Read Article >>

Hot tack of hot melt adhesives (HMA) - by Pierce Covert, Glue Machinery Corporation

Rheology or dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA) has been widely used to study the correlation of viscoelasticity and pressure sensitive adhesive (PSA) properties, such as peel, tack and holding power, since 1980s. Almost all polymers including PSAs are viscoelastic materials possessing both viscous (energy dissipation) and elastic (energy storage) behaviors. These behaviors can be easily determined… Read Article>>

Basic terminology of rheology relative to Hot Melt Pressure Sensitive Adhesive - by Pierce Covert, Glue Machinery Corporation

Peel adhesion force is one of the most important adhesion performance reported on the technical data sheet (TDS) of pressure sensitive adhesives (PSAs). Several standard test methods… Read Article>>

Hot Melt Pressure Sensitive Fracture Modes upon peeling - by Pierce Covert, Glue Machinery Corporation