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Almost everything you see and touch in a vehicle relies on adhesives or sealants. The dashboard components, headliner, and trim are held together with adhesives. Outside, adhesives secure the cladding, lift gate, and headlights. Even your vehicle’s brand decal stays on during all kinds of weather because of adhesives.
Adhesives and sealants make vehicles comfortable, stylish, safe, and functional. Here, we’ll cover how automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) rely on adhesives and sealants to build vehicles, the benefits of choosing adhesives over traditional assembly methods, and the requirements for adhesives and sealants in this challenging application.
How Sealants and Adhesives are Used in the Automotive Industry
Automotive OEMs use sealants to seal the openings and access points within a vehicle’s doors, body, trunk, and more. Sealants protect electronics throughout the vehicle from moisture, water, air, wind, and dirt. They also shield engine components from contaminants.
Adhesives bond interior components with a soft touch or lamination, such as instrument and door panels, center consoles, and armrests. They also bond plastic components to the external surface of vehicles, like facias and spoilers. Adhesives and sealants bond and protect components for exterior lighting, including headlamps and tail lamps.
In electric vehicles, sealants and adhesives provide structural support, stop thermal runaway (i.e., fires), isolate electrical activity, and seal battery packs against environmental stressors. Adhesives maintain the battery's integrity by controlling temperature and vibration, optimizing battery cell life.
Other automotive uses for adhesives and sealants include:
- Powertrain bonding and sealing
- Protecting threaded components
- Structural and multi-material bonding
- Wood panel, plastic, and leather bonding
- Protecting cameras, lidar, and radar for advanced driver assistance systems
- Bonding automotive displays and mirrors
How Adhesives Benefit Automotive Applications
Adhesives offer many advantages over mechanical fastening techniques, such as riveting and welding. Adhesive products are lighter than mechanical fasteners, reducing the vehicle's overall weight and increasing its efficiency. The different substrates used in mechanical bonding, such as aluminum and metal, may corrode over time, whereas adhesives do not corrode.
Adhesive bonds are formed by spacing small beads of a product closely together. When a part comes under stress, the force is distributed evenly across the bond. In contrast, screws and rivets absorb stress in certain areas—leading to failure points. Research shows that adhesives improve vehicle strength and comfort. Most automotive manufacturers use a mixture of mechanical bonding and adhesives to build aesthetically pleasing, high-functioning vehicles.
Chemists and material engineers can adapt adhesive and sealant formulations for bonding and sealing new materials, opening up endless possibilities for innovation. For example, structural adhesives enable using lighter metal alloys and plastic and natural fiber blends to improve a vehicle’s sustainability and performance. Adhesives can also simplify vehicle assembly, lowering production costs, and increasing processing speed.
What Automotive Applications Require of Adhesives and Sealants
Vehicles must last for decades despite constant use in challenging environmental conditions. The adhesives holding components together must maintain their bond despite extreme temperatures, vibration, force, and exposure to ultraviolet (UV) light, road salt, dirt, dust, and weather.
For example, many adhesives become brittle when temperatures plummet. Yet the adhesives holding your vehicle’s door together don’t break when you slam it shut during frigid weather. The adhesive is specifically designed to remain flexible despite the cold.
Adhesive manufacturers rigorously test adhesives and sealants to meet challenging environmental conditions. Typically, these tests are determined by automotive OEMs and their component suppliers and include UV exposure, salt spray, and even car wash simulations. The goal is to create durable products capable of withstanding routine stress.
Adhesives and sealants for automotive applications can give manufacturers design freedom, improve production efficiency, and increase sustainability. Adhesive manufacturers are increasingly creating high-quality products that emit low or negligible amounts of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). In Europe, automotive manufacturers must meet requirements for incorporating recycled content in vehicles. These manufacturers rely on adhesives capable of bonding material made from recycled content.
Another emerging challenge is meeting end-of-life requirements. Automotive manufacturers are starting to request adhesives and sealants capable of de-bonding when the vehicle reaches the end of its life. This requires adhesives capable of both a strong, durable bond and easy disassembly. Debonding adhesives ensures that parts can be reused or recycled instead of thrown away.
Lightweighting (the process of reducing the weight of a particular product without compromising strength, performance or safety) is also increasingly important for vehicles. Consumers demand increased mileage, which necessitates lighter vehicles. Automotive manufacturers must also meet increasingly strict regulations for how far a vehicle must go on a gallon of fuel. In electric vehicles, lightweighting counters battery weight.
Automotive manufacturers can reduce vehicle weight by substituting metal components, such as those used in lift gates, with plastic. This change requires structural, crash-resistant adhesives capable of bonding many types of plastic and metal.
Partnering with H.B. Fuller for Automotive Adhesives and Sealants
Working with an established adhesive manufacturer capable of tackling new challenges, like H.B. Fuller, sets automotive manufacturers ahead. H.B. Fuller’s key advantage is our people. Customers work with local representatives who have technical expertise and prioritize personal service and quick response times. Our material engineers and chemists work hard to ensure adhesives and sealants meet specifications. We also have internal material testing capability, which is often more convenient than outsourcing testing.
H.B. Fuller offers both off-the-shelf automotive adhesives and sealants and customized solutions. Engineers kick off product development by gaining an in-depth understanding of what our customers and the market require. We want to ensure that the new or modified product meets what our customers and the end-users truly want. Examples of H.B. Fuller product lines in this industry include:
- Rapidex® reactive hot melt adhesives bond and seal lighting fixtures, such as headlamps. Recently built vehicles often include running lamps that are constantly on—and constantly producing heat. Rapidex® helps manage high temperatures and protects components from moisture and debris.
- Thermonex® high-performance adhesives enable comfortable and elegant interiors, such as instrument panels and center consoles. They are also water-based, reducing the environmental impact of VOCs.
- Swift®lock and Swift®therm hot melt adhesives offer high-performance solutions for many automotive applications in both the interior and exterior of the vehicle.
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