Structural Adhesives - Improvements in Vehicle Crash Performance 2004-01-0244

In recent years, significantly different fields of adhesive application within the Body In White have allowed substantial influence upon the automotive vehicle construction. These developments led to applications of structural adhesives being used in conjunction with spot welding to provide increased stiffness and stability. Furthermore, new developments in high structural, crash resistant adhesives allow for increased vehicle performance during crash events. This is essential for achieving weight reduction and crash behavior improvement. Like structural foams, crash resistant structural adhesives mainly consist of epoxy resins. Due to a certain level of brittleness, especially during high impact, unmodified structural adhesives are likely to crack. As a result, special flexible polymers, which are heterogeneously spread within the matrix and chemically linked, intervene to prevent crack propagation. This effect was investigated by carrying out crash and impact peel tests. Furthermore, the use of such structural adhesives, their application parameters and contribution to a long-term quality joint are illustrated in this paper.