May 10, 2024 - 3-5 minutes
Why You Should Incorporate Anaerobic Adhesives into Electronic Applications
While anaerobic adhesives are typically used for MRO repair and maintenance, they can also be used in non-MRO applications such as electronics. Learn what anaerobic adhesives are, the benefits they can provide for your applications and how the right supplier can make it easy to incorporate them into your electronic assemblies.
As an electronics manufacturer, it’s important to continually assess the materials used in your products’ assembly, especially as the applications, including virtual reality headsets or vehicle camera sensors that utilize small screws or nuts and bolts, keep evolving to address end-user preferences.
In particular, you want to ensure the materials you choose help you address increasingly rising performance needs while keeping production output high. This can be challenging, especially given the amount of material options available on the market today.
However, anaerobic adhesives are one material you may not have thought about yet that can play a big role in your application’s ability to meet performance and production requirements. Typically known as a solution for MRO maintenance applications, they can also benefit non-MRO applications, like electronics where there are screw or bolt assemblies. Learn what anaerobic adhesives are, the benefits they can provide for your applications and how the right supplier can make it easy to incorporate them into your electronic assemblies.
What are Anaerobic Adhesives?
Anaerobic adhesives are liquid adhesives that cure to fill the air gap between close-fitting surfaces. They are commonly used in metal bonding applications such as threadlocking to prevent small bolts and screws from loosening. They also can easily achieve high strength bonding in small, complex locations within machinery.
Anaerobic adhesives offer the following benefits that can also help your electronic applications meet key performance criteria:
Benefit #1: Vibration and Shock Protection
As a liquid solution, anaerobic adhesives use cohesive strength to fill gaps and provide a seal to protect the metal. For electronic applications that contain very small metal parts such as bolts or screws, anaerobic adhesives can help ensure the parts do not loosen over time even when exposed to repeated vibration. The gap filling provides vibration protection by:
- Increasing contact area: When the anaerobic adhesive fills the small gaps between surfaces, it increases the contact area between them. This helps distribute the load more evenly across the joint, reducing the likelihood of movement between the parts when vibration occurs.
- Damping properties: As vibrations are transmitted through the bonded joint, anaerobic adhesives absorb some of the energy and reduce impact on the joint. This damping effect helps to minimize the transmission of vibration-induced forces that could potentially cause loosening or damage to the assembly.
Benefit #2: Corrosion Prevention
When manufacturing electronic applications, you likely understand the impact that moisture and chemicals can have on delicate parts inside the application if exposed. Anaerobic adhesives can help unitize nuts with corresponding bolts, preventing moisture ingress and protecting against corrosion. Corrosion protection can also help with any necessary repair and dismantling of the electronic unit, which can further prevent error likelihood such as bolt breakage or damage.
Benefit #3: Temperature Performance
When temperature fluctuations occur that can impact an electronics application’s performance, materials may expand and contract, leading to stress buildup and potential joint loosening. Flexible anaerobic adhesives can accommodate these thermal expansions and contractions by stretching or contracting along with the bonded surfaces. This capability helps to maintain the bond integrity and prevent adhesive softening under varying temperature conditions, minimizing the risk of vibration-induced failure.
How Anaerobic Adhesives Meet Electronic Application Production Needs
Anaerobic adhesives also help ensure you’re able to keep electronic assembly production lines moving, offering:
- Primerless adhesion: Anaerobic adhesives can be used directly on inactive materials such as stainless steel, aluminum, zinc, plated parts, and black oxide. This allows you to eliminate a step often needed with other technologies that require a primer, simplifying your overall production and reducing downtime.
- Inventory reduction: A single bottle of an anaerobic adhesive solution works across various thread sizes, allowing you to use one solution on a production line for various applications. This means you no longer need to keep lock nuts in your inventory, which will help make more room in your storage space. As a single component solution, anaerobic adhesives also do not require any mixing or additional components, helping reduce inventory costs and storage space.
How to Incorporate Anaerobic Adhesives into Your Manufacturing
Anaerobic adhesives provide the following features that help you incorporate them into electronic application assembly processes:
- Ease of use in small places: Anaerobic adhesives are all intentionally packaged in small bottles, allowing for easy and precise dispensing in small, complex electronic applications.
- Clean bottle dispensing capabilities: Anaerobic adhesives come in a range of viscosities to allow for clean bottle dispensing:
- Low strength: Compatible with softer metals such as aluminum or anything less than ¼”, you can easily remove the adhesive if desired later without concern of stripping the head.
- Medium strength: Designed to lock and seal general purpose nuts and bolts, you can remove the adhesive with standard hand tools if needed.
- High strength: These solutions are commonly used for permanent applications that require long-term, durable bonding and do not get disassembled routinely.
Why Bostik is the Right Supplier for Anaerobic Adhesives
With a product range including threadlocking, pipe sealing, gasketing and retaining compounds, Bostik’s Born2Bond™ anaerobic adhesives are solventless solutions that help you meet electronic application performance and production needs by offering:
- Increased protection: Designed to create a bond that enables metal-to-metal contact, Bostik's anaerobic adhesives offer gap filling properties that help resist vibration and corrosion, while also providing flexibility for thermal stability.
- Processing efficiencies: With a wide substrate compatibility to stainless steel, aluminum, zinc, plated parts, and black oxide, Bostik’s anaerobic adhesives allow you to rely on one solution for numerous electronic substrates and eliminate production steps with primerless adhesion.
Additionally, Bostik’s anaerobic adhesives are packaged with dosing nozzles that enable you to use the exact amount of product needed for your application. This helps to provide:
- Cost savings: By clicking the nozzle to a specific setting, you’ll dispense the right amount of adhesive required for your desired screw size. With other competitive options, you risk overusing the adhesive, leading to increased supply costs over time.
- High strength: When it comes to anaerobic adhesives, a little goes a long way. Bostik’s anaerobic adhesive solutions come in a 50 ml bottle, which can be used 800 times for a 3/8” nut and bolt size*.
Additionally, our products' packaging is made of 100% plastic and can be fully recycled. Unlike competitive options, it does not contain a metal pin that contributes to landfill waste.
Are you interested in learning how anaerobic adhesives may benefit your non-MRO applications? Contact a Bostik expert to learn how our range of solutions can help you improve end-use performance and processing in your assemblies.
*based on internal testing
Other Relevant Content:
Why Use Born2Bond™ Anaerobic Solutions Over Other Methods
What You Don’t Know – But Should – About Threadlocking Adhesives
Five Reasons Your Plumbers’ Tape is Not as Good as You Think
How to Eliminate Cylindrical Assembly Mechanical Problems
VIDEO: Bostik's Born2Bond Threadlocking Adhesive Demonstration
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