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Brighton Science Blog
Topic: Bonding & Sealing Processes
Adhesive Bonding vs. Mechanical Fastening in Product Design: The Pros and Cons
When cooking up their next great product, designers and manufacturers are constantly looking for ways to produce the highest-performing products while keeping assembly and materials costs low.
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Posts by Topic
Why a Surface Chemistry Input Should be Included in New Product Specifications
When development teams are looking to build a new product that includes a coating, bonding, painting, or sealing process, it's only natural to consider what kind of adhesive, coating, or paint will perform the best. While these selections are critical to the end product's success, development...
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The Best Way to Qualify a Wash Method for Your Manufacturing Process
Parts washers are heavy-duty, hardworking machines that have become irreplaceable staples in automotive andmachined part manufacturing processes. As manufacturing processes have become more sophisticated, the industries using parts washers have expanded to includenot only industrial metals and...
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What The Adhesive Technical Data Sheets Don’t Tell You About Successful Bonding
Manufacturers are using more and more adhesives, and the applications where they’re being used are more critical every year. Consequently, the cost of failure of adhesively bonded products is growing. Users of adhesives are aware that bond failures can occur, but they may not know why. Adhesive...
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How to Measure Contact Angle on Convex and Concave Surfaces
Historically, accurately measuring contact angle on concave and convex surfaces has been a challenge. The typical method used to measure contact angle on these types of surfaces has been with a benchtop goniometer. The challenges arise from the way goniometers measure contact angle—from a...
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Why Automotive Glass Bonding Recalls Should be a Thing of the Past
Automotive glass is a technological marvel. Despite its clarity, there is a lot that is unseen by the average driver. Silica compounds, tempering, and lamination all combine to create one of the most critical components of today’s motor vehicles. Unfortunately, though, things periodically go wrong...
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The Solution to Costly Aircraft Paint Adhesion Failure
The importance of understanding surface quality and being able to measure it in an accurate, reliable, and demonstrable way is important for ensuring a high-quality finish and, ultimately, a high-quality product. Any manufacturer that is not able to do this increases their risk of producing...
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The Surface Analyst™ Instantly Measures Contact Angle to Determine the Potential Adhesive Strength of Bonds
Handheld Solution for Verifying Surface Cleanliness The Surface Analyst™ is an innovative handheld solution for use in the lab and on the factory floor. It reduces waste, rework, and recalls when poorly prepared substrate surfaces lead to bonding, coating, sealing, painting, or printing failure.
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How to Master Industrial Adhesion with Scientific Predictability
Manufacturers who produce products with surfaces that require paints, adhesives, or sealants face a challenge in determining the quality and reliability of the final product. The problem is often caused by the fact that most manufacturers don’t have complete control over three critical elements of...
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Harnessing the Power of Water to Achieve Precise Results
Nature is miraculous. Living entities, be they plants, animals, marine life or humans, can perform an amazing array of complex tasks. As scientists, inventors, and engineers, we take inspiration from any source that provides a good idea. We marvel at how the archerfish uses water to secure their...
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The Water Break Test as a Surface Measurement Gauge
The water break test is a common way for manufacturers to test the surface cleanliness of metals. Compared to other legacy cleanliness tests, it is relatively simple to perform, however, the results rely almost entirely on the subjective eye of the person performing the test. Hydrophobic...
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Why Knowing Water Contact Angle is Important for Successful Adhesive Performance
Adhesives are an integral part of modern manufacturing, but choosing the right adhesive is only one part of the equation. It’s well known that you won’t get a reliable bond with an adhesive if you just slap the adhesive on to your material without doing anything to prepare that surface. What ISN’T...
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How to Avoid Polymeric Coating Failure Which Leads to Corrosion in Materials
We know that plastics are in nearly everything these days, but we don’t often think about how plastics are also on nearly everything. Polymer coatings are as common as the latex paint covering the walls of your house. For industrial use, polymeric coatings have been protecting and beautifying...
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What are Surfactants and How Do They Impact Surface Tension?
In recent articles we’ve discussed what surface tension and surface energy are. Manufacturers need to acquaint themselves with these concepts because controlling surface quality through surface energy measurement of solid materials is the most predictive method of ensuring high performance bonds...
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What is the Difference Between Surface Free Energy and Surface Energy?
When it comes down to it, this is another purely semantic question much like the one we dealt with in another article comparing the terms “surface tension” and “surface energy.” Surface free energy is free energy in a particular space - the surfaces of materials. Free energy, in its most...
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How to Measure Surface Tension
The attractive force of the molecules present at the surface of a liquid towards each other is called the surface tension of that liquid.
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What is the Difference Between Surface Tension and Surface Energy
Using adhesives in manufacturing is becoming increasingly common for building everything from massive machines to everyday tech devices. But companies' reliance on the science of adhesion to make sure their products work perfectly and look marvelous didn’t start there. In the centuries since the...
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Surface Energy Measurement is the Key to Process Control and High Performance
When manufacturing companies take adhesion seriously it can have a remarkable effect on their ability to achieve their business goals. The key is to take a strategic look at adhesion processes early in product development. Glues, epoxies, coatings and other adhesives are coming alongside or...
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Why You Should Use Predictive Data in Building Material Manufacturing
Construction companies and the manufacturers who build the parts and materials that create buildings are relying on adhesives more than ever. When it comes to modern flooring, roofing, siding, windows and wall construction, to make sure the outside stays out and the inside stays warm/cool/dry,...
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How Surface Sensitive Measurements Help Medical Device Manufacturers Avoid Regulatory Bottlenecks
The pathway to zero defect manufacturing through implementation of quality control procedures is found right there in the name. Quality control requires the control of variables to ensure quality outcomes. But it’s the former that is beguiling to quality engineers. The variables in manufacturing...
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Manufacturing Best Practices for Business Continuity Plans
Even though coming to the end of 2020 has not at all meant the end of the impact of Covid-19, manufacturers are pushing forward to make sure 2021 is not marred by the setbacks of this year. This has not been a normal economic downturn and the ways to remain resilient in the past are not enough to...
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Better Consumer Electronics Reliability: Coatings and Adhesives
In a recent study conducted by Instrumental, the top ten most common manufacturing defects were examined. The number one defect that manufacturers fight against is a deficiency in glue. It’s a simple fact that electronic products are relying on adhesive bonding far more than mechanical fasteners in...
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Reliable Wire Bonding Through Quality Data Collection for Industry 4.0
Wire bonding and sintering are critical processes involved in the manufacture of a majority of electronic devices. These processes are used to connect silicon chips, integrated circuits (ICs), and electrical components to their housings and boards. Wire bonding has become one of the most widespread...
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A Great Idea to Help Save the Aerospace Industry
2020 is a year that will live in infamy for many industries. We haven't even seen the full effect of Covid-19 on economies, which inserts a heap of uncertainty into decision making for manufacturers. But one thing is for sure: we're not going to get back to business as usual anytime soon. The ...
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Everything Breaks: What Reliability Means for Adhesively Bonded Products
The seemingly easy and obvious answer to the question implied in the title of this article is: reliability means no failures whatsoever forever and ever, amen. Sadly, it’s not quite so simple. For manufacturing engineers, reliability is an elastic concept that is particular to each and every design.
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Where to Look to Achieve Operational Visibility in Manufacturing
Enterprise manufacturing operations are made up of interlocking, overlapping and critically interdependent processes. Each process in this symbiotic web consists of a series of steps that are only successful when the invisible details are unshrouded and subject to quantitative quality parameters. ...
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Process Control Innovations for Card Manufacturers
We’ve all experienced the disappointing (and kinda embarrassing) moment when we’re at a register trying to buy armfuls of tortilla chips and salsa, and the point-of-sale card reader screams out that an error has occurred. For credit and debit card manufacturers, these are the moments they want to...
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The Best Method of Controlling HMDS Use in Semiconductor Manufacturing
Semiconductors are one of the most fascinating areas of electronics manufacturing. The ability to “grow” almost irreducibly small integrated circuit components on silicon wafers has made an incredible amount of micronization possible. The theory has always been that as the chips got smaller, their...
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Using Data to Improve Ink Adhesion to Polymer Film
One of the most frustrating aspects of experiencing a problem in manufacturing isn't necessarily the issue itself, but rather, it's the difficulty of accurately determining and communicating what the problem actually is. In the case of blown and extruded polymer films (and many other manufacturing...
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Surface Analyst vs. Goniometer Measurements
The Study of Goniometer Measurements Contact angle goniometry is the study of the characterization of liquid/solid interactions. The first benchtop goniometer designed at the NRL (U.S. Naval Research Laboratory) served as a monumental advance with a way to measure contact angles to measure surface...
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How to Control Surface Quality for Bonding Dissimilar Materials
We’ve mentioned many times, in various articles, that bonded material systems are becoming the norm for manufacturers in nearly every industry. In order to make finished products more efficient in terms of weight, to cut material costs, to accommodate more automated processes, to lessen the need of...
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COVID-19 Makes Remote Quality Monitoring Crucial for Manufacturers
Since COVID-19 has reshaped the economic landscape for the foreseeable future and there are many questions about how to safely and effectively respond to it, now is a good time for manufacturers to consider how to make the best of our “new normal” if they haven’t already done so in earnest. In...
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Coatings on Car Sensors and Why We Don’t Have Driverless Cars Yet
Our relationship to our vehicles may have changed in the past few months with the idea of commuting to work looking more like a shuffle to the desk across the room rather than a drive to the office across town. However, cars have not dropped from their prominence in our society. With health risks...
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Controlling Parts Washing Methods for Medical Components
Cleanliness is next to production standardization requirements for medical device manufacturers (as the old saying goes). Devices built to be inserted within the human body understandably need to meet the highest cleanliness standards. Companies in this industry have already known what many of us...
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How to Control Additive Blooming in Polymer Films
We all take the ease of peeling open, and resealing packs of double stuff Oreos for granted. The plastic packaging that maintains the freshness of our favorite snacks and foods has become so ubiquitous it doesn’t even register as existing, until we try to open that hotdog pack with our bare hands...
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Single vs Multi-fluid Contact Angle Techniques Part 1: Surface energy and the attractions between substances
This is part one of a two-part series explaining the finer points of Brighton Science's approach to helping companies build reliability into their cleaning and adhesion processes through consultation and implementation of novel inspection equipment. These two articles are based on this technical...
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Will New Hand Washing Practices Cause Problems for Manufacturing?
Like many industries during the COVID-19 crisis, manufacturing has had to make big changes including scaling back its workforce, enforcing new and intensified hygiene standards and taking a closer look at workplace cleanliness. Looking ahead to the permanent adjustments we’re all making, it’s...
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Proposed ASTM Standard Will Ease the Pain of Manufacturers
An exciting development is taking place to make surface quality and cleanliness inspection technology more available to all manufacturers. We have collaborated with ASTM International and other stakeholders to craft a revision to a practice to establish a standard use of handheld goniometers in...
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Demystifying the Greatest Metal Brazing Process Challenges
When thinking about what manufacturing looks like, most people envision sparks flying, metal clanking and fires blazing. This isn’t too far off the mark since metals have been used for bonding joints together to build larger, sturdier and more stable structures since before the first Industrial...
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How to Protect Overmolded Connectors for Medical Devices
Protective coverings are part and parcel of our lives these days. For industries reliant upon electronic components and connectors, protective coverings in the form of polymeric overmolding encapsulation need to remain sealed and impervious to the environment. To accomplish this, manufacturers of...
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Study Proves the Surface Analyst is Dependable for Process Control
One of our favorite services we provide to manufacturers is to help optimize surface preparation techniques for their particular materials and products. It’s our specialty and one of our biggest passions. We feel so strongly about it because we know that if you, as a manufacturer, are able to...
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How to Bond PTFE to Anything
Polytetrafluoroethylene or PTFE is a very common material in wide use among almost every major industry. This ultra-lubricious and multi-use fluoropolymer touches everyone from aerospace and automotive industries (as an insulating cover on cabling) to musical instrument maintenance (it’s found in...
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A Summary of Surface Treatment Methods for Manufacturers
One of our many mantras here at Brighton Science is that all manufacturers who bond, coat, seal, paint and print stand a better chance of fully understanding and controlling their manufacturing process when it’s defined as an adhesion process. It's our mantra, because adhesion is quite literally...
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Cleaning Strategies for Great Adhesion
Cleanliness in manufacturing gains avid devotees all the time. Once the importance of cleanliness is grasped, it’s nearly impossible to think about manufacturing processes without considering the pervasive impact cleanliness has on every aspect and feature of the process. Cleaning as a means to...
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Surface Quality in Aircraft Sealing and Bonding for Repairs
When an aircraft is manufactured, every single portion of the plane or jet is designed to be able to be serviced and repaired for the next 20-30 years. Aircraft manufacturing OEMs are building aircraft with the expectation that extensive repairs will have to be done later down the road. This is an...
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Component Connection Failure Root Causes on ENIG PCBs
The field of printed circuit board finishing and bonding methods has been growing and diversifying for decades. The design of PCBs depends heavily on the use and environment of the electronic package, and those design decisions include what Surface Mount Technology (SMT) is employed. SMT involves...
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Formed In Place Gasket (FIPG) Reliability Starts with the Surface
Form-in-place-gaskets (FIPG) have been a revolutionary advancement in industries that bank on high-reliability sealing applications. FIPG is a versatile sealing technique that deploys a mostly silicone (they can sometimes be blended with metals like silver, aluminum and nickel for conductivity...
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Conformal Coating Failure Caused by Poor Surface Cleanliness
Electronic components consist of many exposed and delicate pieces that leave them vulnerable. A lot is relying on these fragile parts to function without fail. From implantable medical devices to navigational equipment and from sensor packages in cars to cell phones, the manufacturers of...
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Importance of Adhesion & Composites in Lightweighting Cars
One of the most pressing questions on the minds of manufacturing engineers is how to take a load off. Lightweighting, or shedding pounds on assembled vehicles and machinery, is a critical puzzle in aerospace, marine and, most acutely, in automotive industries. In fact, with the pressure to optimize...
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Is Roughness as Important as Surface Cleanliness to Adhesion?
When the subject of material surfaces comes up among manufacturing engineers the discussion usually centers on the physical attributes of that surface; the surface topography or morphology, or more simply - the surface roughness. Preparing material surfaces for assembly, coating, painting or...
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The Tools & Skills to Address Adhesion Problems in Production
When adhesion issues become apparent in a manufacturing process, they can seem to come out of nowhere. When coatings on circuit boards delaminate and cause shorts; when automotive glass doesn’t properly seal and moisture is let through, or when implantable medical devices aren’t meeting cleanliness...
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The 3 Crucial Elements for High-Performance Adhesion in Manufacturing
Excellent adhesion relies on the manufacturer’s ability to understand and control three distinct yet interrelated elements. In manufacturing, adhesive bonding takes many forms, but the fundamental principles of adhesion are always the same. Even if the application is metal joint welding, Parylene...
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Fundamentals of Adhesion & Why 3 Molecular Layers Matter
Adhesion is a powerful phenomenon that can hold massive structures together and fuse microscopic compounds. It is also extremely dependent upon delicate and fragile processes to succeed. In manufacturing, adhesive bonding takes many forms but the principles of adhesion are always the same. Even if...
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New Solutions to Address Adhesion Failures in Manufacturing
In order to create predictable adhesion outcomes in manufacturing, precision is key. When thinking about the success of a bonding, printing, coating, sealing, painting or cleaning application, manufacturers need a new perspective. Manufacturers need an approach that considers the entire adhesion...
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Best-practice Surface Preparation Processes for New Products
New Product Development is an essential component to the successful growth of companies who always challenge themselves to improve and innovate. Getting this design stage right is pivotal in that it sets in motion everything the product will be and how well it will perform. Yet, many new products...
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What are the Primary Causes of Chronic Adhesion Failures?
Adhesion problems have a tendency to show up in a manufacturing process and then overstay their welcome. The chronic nature of so many adhesion issues is due to factors that many manufacturing companies are oblivious to. That’s not to fault the manufacturers. Until recently, there hasn’t been a...
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How to Minimize Production Scrap from Adhesion Failures
In manufacturing it is extremely difficult to eliminate all inefficiencies and production deficits. Setbacks that come in the form of scrap rates and rework resulting from product failures before shipping out or recalls and returns after products have gone to market, are par for the course--but...
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Best Approach to Adhesion Failure Root-Cause Analysis
There are a lot of options available to manufacturers who are trying to prevent product failures caused by imperfect adhesion. Many times the plan of attack is to budget adhesion failures into the scrap rate and consider the job done. In other, more dramatic instances, companies will overhaul their...
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Identifying Adhesive Bond Failure Points in Manufacturing
Adhesion processes vary widely across different industries that incorporate bonding, sealing, printing, coating, painting or cleaning into their manufacturing operations. Every adhesion process is constructed differently based upon what the product being manufactured requires. However, all...
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How to Ensure a Manufacturing Surface is Clean Enough for Adhesion
Cleanliness and adhesion go hand-in-hand. If you’re looking for an adhesion process to be successful then you are also absolutely interested in cleaning the materials involved in the application. In order to get the most out of your cleaning operations it’s imperative to know three things: What...
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How Surface Quality Devices Can Validate Adhesion Specs
Regulatory specifications in manufacturing exist to ensure that the highest quality, safest and most useful products are created. These are devised internally through research and development testing to meet customer demands and through external regulatory bodies to protect consumers and public...
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How to Transfer a Lab Surface Treatment Process to Production
Production processes don’t just materialize, fully-formed on the manufacturing floor. Procedures and operations go through a full research and development cycle which can take years before they are integrated into the production line. This pre-production work includes strength, reliability, and...
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Can a Surface Science Lab Ensure Adhesion in Manufacturing?
Manufacturers utilize research and design laboratories all the time. To scale new products up to the production line, years of toiling in testing labs is done to ensure that everything goes off without a hitch once production starts. There are some areas crucial to adhesion processes that these R&D...
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Secrets to Predicting Adhesion Failures in Production
When adhesion failure becomes apparent in manufacturing processes it can seem to come out of nowhere. Very often, there is no problem until suddenly there is. It feels unpredictable, unavoidable and like the best solution is to either eat the loss it brings or just hope it goes away as quickly and...
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Why a Surface Quality Inspection Process Ensures Adhesion
Manufacturing processes that involve bonding, coating, sealing, printing, painting, laminating or cleaning need a metric to measure the surface quality of the materials involved. Without such a metric it is impossible to predict whether the adhesion process will be successful or if it's on the path...
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7 Most Valuable Tips to Ensure Proper Adhesion in Production
Adhesion problems are an insidious concern to manufacturers in any industry with printing, painting, bonding, laminating, or coating applications. These problems settle into a production process, and they manifest in many different ways. An adhesion issue could look like a joint failure, uneven...
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Easy Ways to Find Manufacturing Adhesion Failure Sources
When adhesion failure plagues a manufacturing process it can be particularly disruptive. A production process may be humming along just fine and then it suddenly becomes clear that a coating is uneven, or paint is chipping (when it wasn’t before), or joints are weaker than they had been, or film is...
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How to Fix Common Causes of Adhesion Problems
Manufacturers often have a large blind spot when it comes to the causes of adhesion problems. This blind spot makes it impossible to solve these problems and generates frustration and loss rather than productivity and adhesion success. Taking the blinders off and taking on adhesion failure at its...
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NASA and UVA Work with Brighton Science (formerly BTG Labs) to Co-Author Spectroscopy Journal Article
Brighton Science's Founder and Chief Scientist, Dr. Giles Dillingham and Research and Development Chemist, Brooke Campbell recently collaborated with NASA scientists and researchers from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Virginia on an article published in...
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Guaranteeing Anti-fog Coating Application on Automotive Headlights
The competitive nature of the automotive industry requires manufacturers to engineer the ideal product; failures, no matter how small, are unacceptable and can bring heavy consequences.
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Tales from Brighton Science's Materials & Processing Lab
In the Brighton Science Materials and Processing laboratory, magic happens. Or, at least it seems that way. In the lab, our specialists see the unseen. They use expertise, specialized tools and data to reveal the invisible. We’re talking about invisible surface chemistry, of course. “Usually, the...
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Surface Treatment Processes: Flame Treatment
Flame treatment is a surface activation treatment process used to chemically modify a surface for better adhesion. This process is typically used on low energy surfaces that can be difficult to adhere to, such as plastics and composites. The treatment is also very gentle, posing low risk to the...
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Automotive Applications Series: Polymer Painting and Bonding in Automotive Manufacturing
Polymers are some of the most common base materials used in automotive parts. Polypropelenes, Polyolefins, and ABS plastics are used in dashboards, door panels, bumper fascias, liftgates, sensors, and increasingly exterior doors and fenders. A polymer is a low surface energy material that typically...
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Automotive Applications Series: Ensuring Success for Formed-In-Place Gasket (FIPG) Applications
Controlling Surface Condition in FIPG Application Increasingly, FIPG processes are replacing traditional gaskets for a variety of automotive applications such as air filters, oil filters, door panels, and external engine parts. The advantages include cheaper material cost, higher throughput...
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