Bonding Foams & Fibrous Materials with Avery Dennison Performance Tapes
It’s often tricky to find a good tape solution when you’re working with foams or fibrous surfaces. But whether you’re working with felts, other fabrics, or foams, Avery Dennison Performance Tapes has you covered.
For example, Avery Dennison’s Core Series™ Portfolio alone offers you 10 adhesive categories that give you what you need to succeed with these materials. According to their Core Series™ Portfolio nine of the 10 adhesive families are highly compatible for bonding to felts and other fabrics including woven and nonwoven varieties.
Avery Dennison’s 10 adhesive families also give you a range of choices for foam-bonding applications. Some of these options include solutions for the following foams:
- Polyether urethane
- Dense urethane
- Sponge rubber
- Silicone sponge
You may need a good seal for insulation. Or you may require a foam-bonding tape with plasticizer resistance. Whatever your application calls for, Avery Dennison’s Core Series™ Portfolio has a tape adhesive to get the job done.
Why It Can Be Tricky for Tapes to Stick to Foams and Fabrics
If only every surface were as easy to stick to as stainless steel! Tapes work best when their adhesives can easily spread across as much of a material’s surface as possible. So, products that are flat, smooth, and allow the tape to wet out across the entire surface of the bonded area are ideal. This is why tapes work so well with stainless steel.
But the surfaces of foams and fabrics are anything but flat and smooth. They are often porous, covered in folds, peaks, and valleys that create a rough or uneven terrain for the tape to work with. Such texture can make it hard for the tape’s adhesive to wet out across and fill all the gaps. So, a tape’s hold to foam or fabric could weaken as it covers less of the material’s surface.
Considering all this, Avery Dennison tape and adhesive solutions are all the more impressive because they do great even with these challenging materials. Avery Dennison has several great options capable of wetting out well enough to fill the gaps and valleys to hold strong to foams and fabrics.
Bonding Fabrics
As briefly mentioned above, the Core Series™ Portfolio includes 10 adhesive categories to choose from. All but the silicone adhesive family work great for all kinds of felts and fabrics. The adhesive categories include the following:
- General Purpose Rubber
- High Shear General Purpose Rubber
- Low VOC Acrylic
- High Performance Low VOC Acrylic
- General Purpose Acrylic
- LSE Modified Acrylic
- High Shear Acrylic
- Pure Acrylic
- High Performance Acrylic (their HPA™ line)
- Silicone (not recommended for bonding fabrics and felts)
As you can see by just the names, these adhesives give you a smattering of options to meet your application’s needs. They include economical general-purpose tapes with either rubber-based or acrylic-based adhesives. They also consider certain applications that require extra shear strength when your project calls for strong load-bearing capabilities.
Additionally, if your application involves exposure to high temperatures, they have high-performance adhesives available. If you’re working with challenging surfaces to stick to such as low surface energy (LSE) materials, they have an acrylic adhesive modified specifically for such applications.
Plus, they have two great options that offer low volatile organic compound (VOC) performance. VOCs are compounds that turn from a solid to a gas at room temperature. VOCs released from products can be bad for employees and customers to breathe in by adding pollutants to the air. Many industries regulate VOCs, and many consumers want more environmentally friendly options. With Avery Dennison Performance Tapes, you have healthier options to choose from when bonding to fabrics.
Polyether Urethane Foam Bonding
For bonding applications using polyether urethane foam, five of Avery Dennison’s acrylic adhesive categories work great:
- Low VOC Acrylic
- High Performance Low VOC Acrylic
- LSE Modified Acrylic
- High Shear Acrylic
- Pure Acrylic
These five choices help cover the gamut of your application needs. If you need tape with low VOC, LSE, high shear, and/or high temperature performance, you’ve got options to choose from.
Polyester Urethane & Dense Urethane Foam Bonding
When it comes to bonding applications using polyester urethane or dense urethane foam, the adhesive families below can do the job:
- General Purpose Rubber
- Low VOC Acrylic
- High Performance Low VOC Acrylic
- General Purpose Acrylic
- LSE Modified Acrylic
- High Shear Acrylic
- Pure Acrylic
Dense urethane foams are often simply known by different popular brand names. These include Poron®, HyPUR-cel®, Norseal®, and others.
Sponge Rubber Foam Bonding
The following five adhesive categories are fantastic choices when bonding to sponge rubber foams:
- General Purpose Rubber
- Low VOC Acrylic
- High Performance Low VOC Acrylic
- General Purpose Acrylic
- LSE Modified Acrylic
These choices work with a variety of sponge rubber foams. Some examples include EPDM, PVC, nitrile vinyl, and neoprene.
Silicone Sponge Foam Bonding
Bonding silicone foams add an extra complication when finding the right tape solution. Not only do they have the challenging texture, but being silicone-based, they also present a low surface energy. Even still, Avery Dennison provides an adhesive solution for bonding to silicone sponge foams:
- Silicone
Simple enough to remember, a handy rule of thumb is like materials attract well to other like materials. So, their Silicone adhesive category bonds well to silicone foams.
Another thing to keep in mind as well is Walker Tape Converting’s ability to create custom differential solutions for your application. For example, if you needed to bond a silicone sponge foam to another type of foam, we can create a tape with silicone adhesive on one side and another adhesive for the other foam on another.
Send us a free quote request today, and we can help you find the right Avery Dennison Performance Tape for your project!
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