SIMTech technical reports (STR_V9_N3_02_FTG)

Volume 9 Number 3 Jul-Sep 2008

In-situ plastic-to-metal adhesive bonding via injection moulding

S. L. Liu, T. T. Ng and K. P. Lim

Abstract This project investigates the feasibility of metal-to-plastic adhesive bonding. The bonding process is performed and completed through normal plastic injection moulding process. The effects of surface pretreatment and moulding processing parameters on the bonding strengths were studied. It is attempted to correlate the bonding strength with the morphology of the fracture interfaces. Keywords: Plastic-to-metal, Adhesive bonding, Injection moulding

BACKGROUND

In the integration process of a product, the bonding of two parts made from two dissimilar materials is commonly encountered. There are a few methods to bond two dissimilar materials, such as physical, chemical and mechanical bonding. Physical bonding, such as wire bonding, is commonly used in the electronics industry, where one metal has a relatively low melting point. Mechanical bonding with the use of screws, rivets, and spot welds, has been commonly used to join two or more adherents together. However, chemical bonding is becoming more widely used and is replacing mechanical bonding in many applications, including the bonding of metal to plastic materials. Although joining of various adherents can be challenging, with the use of adhesives, in many cases, product performance and durability are increased, component and assembly costs are reduced,

and fewer finishing operations are required. This is especially useful when miniaturisation and aesthetics of a product are of importance in the consumer electronics. Since the nature of the adhesive bonding is essentially a chemical process, there are quite a few factors affecting the bonding strength and durability. From the theoretical considerations and extensive practical testing, the following factors need to be considered to achieve satisfactory bonding: (a) suitable surface pre-treatment surface preparation is, perhaps, the most important process governing the quality of an adhesive bond; (b) adhesive choice the adhesive should be able to wet the adherent and solidify under production conditions: time, temperature, and pressure; (c) joint design adhesive joints are generally more resistant to shearing, compressive, and tensile stresses than they are to stress systems due to peeling; and (d) service condition polymeric adhesives generally have higher coefficients of thermal expansion than metals and ceramics. In the traditional adhesive bonding of plastic-to-metal, the plastic parts shall be moulded in advance. In this study, the in-situ bonding of plastic-to-metal will be performed. Figure 1 compares the two bonding processes. In this project, the bonding behaviour of polycarbonate to aluminium, which are the materials commonly used in electronics products will be examined with focus placed on the effects of surface treatment and moulding conditions on the bonding strengths will be investigated.

(A)

Metal substrate
Mixing of hardener with adhesive Applying adhesive Pre-molded plastic part

Metal substrate
Final product

Metal substrate
Assembly & Curing

Metal substrate
Drying of adhesive

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(B)

M etal substrate
Applying adhesive

M etal substrate
Molding & final product

M etal substrate
Drying of adhesive

Fig. 1. The comparison of: (a) traditional adhesive bonding; and (b) in-situ adhesive bonding.

OBJECTIVE

3.2

Specimen Preparation

The objective of this project is to study the feasibility of metal-to-plastic adhesive bonding and the bonding process shall be completed in the plastic injection moulding process. 3 3.1 METHODOLOGY Materials

The metal used in this study is Aluminium 6106 and the plastic is polycarbonate. The adhesive is a latent reactive polyurethane provided by Bayer. The chemical reaction for the cure crosslinking of the polyurethane is illustrated in Fig. 2. As the crosslinking reaction of polyurethane is fast, it must be deactivated at storage. This is achieved by the surface deactivation reaction. NCO groups on the particle surface react with the amine NH2 to form ureas, thus preventing the isocyanate particles from reacting with the water. Chemicals including hydro fluoride, sodium hydroxide were purchased from Sigma-Aldrich and were used as received.

Two types of aluminium half tensile bars were machined according to the following dimensions (Fig. 3). Both types of the half tensile bars can fit in the mould which is used for injection moulding of plastic tensile specimens. The differences of these two types of tensile bars provide different joint designs. The results of bonding strengths in this project were based on the design (a). After machining, the tensile bars were subjected to different surface treatments before bonding with polycarbonates. In this study, two surface treatments were conducted. They were acid treatment and alkali treatment. 3.3 Moulding Process

The injection moulding was conducted on a Nestal injection moulding machine. The moulding conditions such as melt temperature, mould temperature, and cooling time were adjusted according to experimental design.

Fig. 2. Crosslinking for the formation of polyurethane.

(a)

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In-situ plastic-to-metal adhesive bonding via injection moulding

essing and past experience. As the injection time is short, the adhesive is cured mainly during cooling. Therefore, longer cooling time shall favour more extensive curing, thus providing higher bonding strength. However, longer cooling time will lower productivity. As such, the cooling time was set between 10 s and 60 s. 4.2 Bonding Results

(b) Fig. 3. The dimensions of Al half tensile bars.

3.4

Characterisation

The curing behaviour of the latent reactive polyurethane was characterised with a TA2910 differential scanning calorimeter. The heating rate used was 10C/min. And the testing was carried out from 40C to 150C under the nitrogen purge. The bonding strength was measured using an Instron 4505 tensile machine. The crosshead speed was maintained at 2 mm/min during tests. The fracture morphologies of the interfaces and adhesives were observed with an optical microscope. 4 4.1 RESULTS & DISCUSSION Design of Experiments (DOE)

After the determination of the critical processing parameters, bonding experiments were conducted. Table 1 gives the bonding results for the specimens treated with acid. From this table it can be seen that the bonding strength varies dramatically with the change of moulding conditions. To find the most critical parameters which affect the bond strength, the DOE analysis was performed. Figure 4 shows the effect of various moulding conditions on the bonding strength. It can be seen from Fig. 4 that the bonding strengths decrease with increasing mould and melt temperatures, whereas the cooling time has little effect on the bonding strengths in the range investigated. From these experimental results, the moulding parameters can be optimised at: melt temperature 280C, mould temperature 70C and cooling time 10 s.
Table 1. Bonding results for the acid treated samples. Run 1 2 3 4 Mould Temperature (C) 100 70 100 70 Melt Temperature (C) 320 320 280 280 Cooling Time (s) 60 10 10 60 Bonding Strength (MPa) 0.312 0.725 0.972 1.410

As there are a lot of moulding parameters influencing the bonding strength, such as melt temperature, cooling time, and mould temperature, their effects on the bond strength shall be determined first. As such, a 3 factor, 2 level design of experimental matrix was designed. The three factors are mould temperature, melt temperature, and cooling time. The response is the bond strength. The first step of the DOE is to determine the low and high value of each experimental parameter. As recommended from the supplier, polycarbonate can be processed above 280C. Polycarbonate will decompose at high temperature. Therefore, the low end was set to 280C, and the high end was set to 320C. Mould temperature was determined according to both the polycarbonate processing temperature and the cure temperature of the adhesive. The latent reactive polycarbonate starts to cure around 98.5C and is fully cured around 140C. Considering that there is an operation time after the insertion of the aluminium bar coated with adhesive into the mould and before the injection moulding, the mould temperature shall be lower than 110C, which is the fast cure temperature. The low end of the mould temperature shall take the flowability of polycarbonate into consideration. This is due to the poor flowability of polycarbonate at low mould temperature. Therefore, the low end of mould temperature is set to 70C. The cooling time is set based on the recommendation for material proc-

Table 2 shows the bonding results for the specimens treated with alkali. It seems that the variation of bonding strengths is much less in this category, compared with that in the acid treated group. The DOE analysis of various bonding conditions on the bonding strength was performed and the results are shown in Fig. 5. For the alkali treated samples, the mould temperature and melt temperature show opposite effects on the bonding strength. Increasing mould temperature results in an increase of the bonding strength, while increasing melt temperature will decrease the bonding strength. Similar to the samples treated with acid, samples treated with alkali are also insensitive to cooling time as evidenced in Fig. 5(c).
Table 2. Bonding results for the alkali treated samples. Run 1 2 3 4 Mould Temperature (C) 100 70 100 70 Melt Temperature (C) 320 320 280 280 Cooling Time (s) 60 10 10 60 Bonding Strength (MPa) 1.410 0.749 1.710 1.380

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(MPa)

(C)

(MPa)

(C)

(MPa)

(MPa)

(C)

(C)

(MPa)

(MPa)

(s)

(s)

Fig. 4. The responses (bonding strength) to moulding conditions for the acid treated specimens: (a) mould temperature, (b) melt temperature, and (c) cooling time.

Fig. 5. The responses (bonding strength) to moulding conditions for the alkali treated specimens: (a) mould temperature, (b) melt temperature, and (c) cooling time.

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As the bonding strength is affected inversely to the melt temperature and mould temperature at similar intensity (slopes of Figs. 5(a) and (b)), the moulding parameters for the alkali treated samples can be optimised at: melt temperature 300C, mould temperature 85C and cooling time 10 s. Figure 6 compares the effects of different treatments on the bonding strengths. It is quite obvious that alkali treatment is much more efficient in obtaining good bonding. This could be resulted from a better removal of oxides on the surface and the formation of non-uniform crates on the surface, which are helpful in locking the adhesive and improving the bonding strength.
(b)
Bonding Strength
Acid
2.50E+06

Bonding Strength (N/m 2 )

Alkali

Fig. 7. The morphologies of the fractured surfaces of samples with: (a) low bonding strength, and (b) high bonding strength.

2.00E+06 1.50E+06 1.00E+06 5.00E+05 0.00E+00 1 2 3 4

CONCLUSION

Run

4.3

Fracture Surface Analysis

From the above bonding results we can see that the bond strength varies tremendously with different moulding conditions and surface treatments. Figure 7 shows the morphology for the specimens showing low and high bonding strengths, respectively. For the specimen showing low bonding strength, the fracture surface is smooth, and the island morphologies dominate. This could be resulted from the incomplete cure of the adhesive. For the specimen showing high bonding strength, the fracture surface is rough and fracture is mainly caused by the tearing of the adhesive.

This project has proved the feasibility of polymer-to-metal adhesive in-situ bonding through injection moulding. Compared with traditional two-part bonding method, in-situ bonding technique is much faster and can reduce assembly process. The key moulding parameters which affect the bond strengths are identified through the design of experiments. It was also found that alkali treatment is more effective in improving the bonding strength than acid treatment. 6 INDUSTRIAL SIGNIFICANCE

The in-situ bonding process developed in this project exhibits advantages over traditional two-part adhesive bonding. The in-situ bonding process has reduced a few process steps compared with the traditional two-part adhesive bonding process. The bonding technology developed in this project will be very useful for the bonding of dissimilar materials, especially for those electronics industry where thin wall metal frames shall be bonded with plastic materials. REFERENCES
[1] E.W. Thrall, R.W. Shannon, Adhesive bonding of aluminum alloys, New York: M. Dekker , 1985. [2] R.D. Adams, Adhesive bonding: science, technology and applications, Cambridge: Woodhead Publications, Boca Raton, Fla. CRC Press, 2005.

(a)

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