May 29, 2024 - 3-5 minutes
Does Your Adhesive Keep Up With Window Film Needs?
Discover how your window film adhesives can enhance energy savings and sustainability while maintaining high performance with specialty solution acrylic pressure sensitive adhesives (PSAs).
In window film manufacturing, energy savings plays a big factor in how you develop your end-use products, as you know this appeals to brand owner and consumer sustainability interests. While the energy savings itself mainly comes from the film material you choose, you may not know that your window film adhesive can also help you reduce your overall environmental footprint and still maintain key performance features and processing efficiencies.
Learn about the key capabilities your window film adhesives should offer and how specialty solution acrylic pressure sensitive adhesives address those specific needs.
#1: Optical Clarity
When choosing window film adhesive, it is essential that the adhesive technology provides optical clarity to prevent aging or yellowing that would prevent the end user from being able to see through the window. Therefore, your adhesive should possess:
- Cold flow protection contributes to the adhesive maintaining its structural properties, even in cold temperatures or climates. This helps prevent the adhesive from flowing between the film over time to remain optically clear, which is what eventually leads to yellowing or aging.
- Balanced peel and cohesive strength helps ensure the film has uniform adhesion to the window surface, preventing air pockets or gaps that can distort visibility. If the adhesive's peel strength is too low, it may not properly bond the film to the window, leading to potential delamination over time. This can cause air or moisture between the film and window, reducing clarity. Similarly, if the cohesive strength is too low, the adhesive may not hold the film layers together, leading to separation and loss of optical clarity.
How Specialty Solution Acrylic PSAs Help Provide Optical Clarity:
Specialty solution acrylic PSAs provide the necessary cold flow protection and balanced peel and cohesive strength to achieve optical clarity, along with:
- Low levels of purities: As an acrylic technology, specialty solution acrylic PSAs are formulated with low levels of impurities that might otherwise contribute to yellowing or haze to reduce visibility. Their wetting properties help the adhesive spread evenly across the substrate for a smooth surface finish, minimizing air pockets or irregularities to increase optical clarity.
- Chemical stability: Specialty solution acrylic PSAs are known for providing high strength and low residual stress after application, which helps them conform well to the film and window surface without causing distortion. They are also designed to protect the window film from discoloration or degradation caused by moisture, chemicals or cleaning agents throughout the film’s lifespan.
#2: Durability
Choosing an adhesive that is specifically designed for long-term durability will help expand the overall lifespan of the window film and contribute to less material waste over time. To help ensure product longevity, the adhesive should offer:
- Temperature resistance allows the adhesive to maintain its strength across a wide range of temperatures, including extremely hot or cold conditions. This helps prevent the window film from peeling or delaminating due to softening or hardening, resulting in a long lifespan.
- Migration resistance prevents the adhesive’s additives or components from transferring to other parts of the film, which could otherwise result in loss of tackiness, bond strength or flexibility. By protecting these adhesive performance capabilities from spreading apart, the window film will maintain durability for long-term usage.
- Balance between initial tack and permanent adhesion is important so that the window film can be repositioned before permanent, long-term adhesion takes place. The initial tack should hold the window film in place during installation while allowing for repositioning if adjustments are needed. Once in place, the adhesive should provide permanent, long-term strength until the window film needs to be fully removed.
How Specialty Solution Acrylic PSAs Help Provide Durability:
Specialty solution acrylic PSAs offer temperature and migration resistance and balance between initial tack and permanent adhesion to maintain strong bonding and longevity in window films. They also provide:
- Strong resilience: As previously mentioned, specialty solution acrylic PSAs have superior chemical stability that helps it maintain adhesion properties over time and prevent migration, helping to stop any peeling or delamination.
- Versatile adhesion: This adhesive technology offers strong bonding to both plastics and glass to provide one reliable solution for numerous substrate needs and reduce changeouts on your production line.
- Long-term usage: Specialty solution acrylic PSAs are designed to provide permanent adhesion for years to reduce product replacements after installation. They can be repositioned before fully setting to provide accurate placement.
- Good flexibility: Specialty solution acrylic PSAs accommodate for thermal expansion or contraction to help prevent any cracking or brittleness over time.
#3: Sustainability
While the window film material itself will be the key factor in providing energy savings to the end user, the adhesive also helps improve the overall sustainability of the product, addressing both brand owner and consumer interests. Some of the ways your adhesive can provide additional sustainability benefits include offering:
- Reduced carbon emissions: An adhesive with high solids and less solvents can help streamline processing steps that contribute to carbon emissions. This is because there aren’t many solvents that need to evaporate, which means there’s less downtime before moving to the next step. Additionally, by utilizing an adhesive that offers multi-substrate adhesion, you can also help reduce energy levels within your facility. This is because it decreases changeouts and allows for more products to move through your production line at a time.
How Specialty Solution Acrylic PSAs Help Provide Sustainability:
Specialty solution acrylic PSAs can help with sustainability by offering:
- Higher solids content than other solvent-based options: Choosing a specialty solution acrylic PSA over other solvent-based options helps reduce overall solvents in your production. This means less solvents are burned off, and more solids content can be used from the overall supply compared to other solvent-based solutions.
- Improved energy usage: By using a technology that offers multi-substrate adhesion, specialty solution acrylic PSAs help reduce downtime that contributes to overall facility energy usage with less changeouts.
How Bostik Can Help
As the adhesives solution segment of Arkema, Bostik offers the most complete and integrated portfolio of PSA offerings on the market. Our specialty solution acrylic PSAs allow you versatility in choosing an option most suitable for your window film application needs, while also helping you improve your environmental footprint over traditional solvent-based PSAs. When you choose a PSA solution with Bostik, you’ll also receive:
- Technical support: Our team of experts works with you step by step to determine a formulation that addresses your specific application needs. This includes trial testing to develop customized solutions on your desired substrates. We also understand you may be new to exploring PSA technologies; that’s why we offer pilot coating capabilities that enable you to continue day-to-day operations while determining the right solution.
- Troubleshooting: We help you address production issues to ensure efficiencies by assessing your equipment on-site and making recommendations according to your specific facility capabilities.
Are you ready to choose a PSA solution for your window film applications? Contact a Bostik expert to learn how we can help you find the right PSA technology for your needs.
Other Relevant Content:
Bostik’s Pressure Sensitive Adhesives At-A-Glance
What to Know Before Selecting a Specialty Film Pressure Sensitive Adhesive
©2024 Bostik, Inc. All Rights Reserved
All information contained herein is believed to be accurate as of the date of publication, is provided “as-is” and is subject to change without notice. To review our full U.S. Legal Disclaimer, visit: https://bostik.com/us/en_US/privacy-policy/legal-disclaimer