4 Reasons You Need Water-Based Adhesives For Automotive Interiors

Water-based adhesives have improved in recent years, enabling them to offer distinct advantages over other options and make them an excellent choice for automotive interior manufacturing. Discover four key advantages to using water-based adhesives and why you need to implement them in your next automotive interior assembly application. 

Vinyl and foam materials are often used in interior trim assembly. These materials are thin and solvent-sensitive, so certain adhesive technologies can bleed through their surface and appear on the trim. These marks can negatively impact the vehicle’s visual aesthetics. Other adhesives can also cause swelling in these materials, further impacting design opportunities and aesthetics. These limitations can prevent you from keeping up with consumer demands for sleek, high-quality interiors.

Water-based adhesives, however, are compatible with solvent-sensitive substrates. They reduce the risk of bleed-through and will not create swelling issues. As a result, you’ll increase your design options and improve your ability to meet consumer demands for visual aesthetics.

While moisture-sensitive adhesives can be useful for automotive applications, they can be difficult to handle.The air around the adhesives must be fully dry during production. If not, the adhesives can cure prematurely. This causes reduced pot life and buildup on nozzles, hoses and pots that can cause downtime to fix.

Water-based adhesives do not require dry atomization prior to application, as they are not moisture-sensitive. This property can help you reduce production steps and error likelihood, while prolonging pot life.These adhesives also remain stable in high levels of humidity and across a wide temperature range. Further, water-based adhesives can be dispensed using several methods, making it easy to implement them into your production process.

You may find that certain adhesives work well for one portion of the automotive interior, but not others. Not all adhesives adhere to all substrates, and some may only work for one or two-sided applications.This can add complexity to your production process; using more than one adhesive not only drives up production costs, but can add more steps as well.

In contrast, water-based adhesives are known for being flexible; they can adhere to many different substrates. Additionally, water-based adhesives are compatible for both one and two-sided application methods.They are also easy to implement and generally do not require additional equipment. Therefore, water-based adhesives enable you to use just one adhesive in your production process, keeping costs down and reducing complexities.

Certain adhesives, including solvent-based solutions, can be harmful to the environment and potentially to your workers. While versatile for many automotive applications, solvent-based adhesives can release volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and cause other worker concerns, which is why the market is shifting away from these solutions.

Water-based adhesives inherently make it easy to address these issues due to their VOC-free formulation, which reduces risk and helps your company meet sustainability goals.

Water-based adhesives offer you numerous benefits, and Bostik’s new, water-based adhesive can deliver on these advantages. Aquagrip L3720 is an innovative, water-based adhesive that can help improve your automotive interior manufacturing process. Learn more about this unique solution when you contact a Bostik representative today

You can also learn more with this other relevant content:

• How Bostik’s Water-Based Adhesives Benefit Customers
• Importance of Water-Based Adhesive Technology
• How to Make Automotive Interior Trim Assembly Easy