Adhesion and Bonding Design

Why bonds fail — surface energy, substrate treatments, adhesive chemistries, joint loading, failure modes, and environmental durability.

Private cohorts & on-site
Format: 2-day (8:30 a.m.–4:30 p.m.)
Level: Intermediate
Location: Scheduled on demand · on-site at your facility or a regional venue
Date(s): Not yet scheduled for open enrollment. Get notified when it is, or book it privately for your team.
Includes: Certificate of Completion · printed slide binder · take-home reference text

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One email when dates are set. Or skip the wait: run it as a private cohort, on-site at your plant.

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Faculty

Faculty details for this seminar will be announced with the full schedule.

Fees

Early: $1,895 (payment 4+ weeks ahead)
Standard: $2,095 (check/ACH) · $2,165 (card)

Group discount: $200 off per attendee for 3+ from the same organization.

Also Available

  • Corporate on-site delivery at your facility
  • Private cohort sessions
  • Digital curriculum licensing

Seminar Overview

Adhesive bonding is the joining method with the highest expectations and the highest failure rate in plastics product development — usually because the joint was designed around a datasheet shear value rather than around surfaces, stress states, and cure chemistry. This seminar is built from the single authoritative primary source in the field: the **Loctite Design Guide for Bonding Plastics — both volume 5 and the current volume 6** — covering substrate-by-substrate adhesive recommendations, surface preparation chemistry, joint design rules, cure mechanics, and environmental durability data for every major plastic family. It is supplemented by the Parker O-Ring Handbook (where elastomeric sealing meets bonding interfaces) and the broader design-guides corpus for the part-design context that joints live inside.

Day one builds the fundamentals: why bond instead of weld or fasten, surface energy and wettability (the dyne-level ladder and what each rung permits), substrate surface treatments from solvent wipe to corona, plasma, and flame treatment, and the adhesive chemistries — cyanoacrylate, epoxy, acrylic, polyurethane, silicone — with each family's speed, strength, gap-fill, and flexibility character. Day two is design practice: joint geometry for shear, peel, cleavage, and tension; adhesive-vs- cohesive failure interpretation; cure processes and their fixtures; test methods; and environmental durability — heat, humidity, chemical exposure — closing with a full joint design workshop on attendee-supplied assemblies.

The differentiator: this seminar is taught from PRIMARY SOURCE material — the actual Loctite design guides, their substrate/adhesive tables, and their durability datasets — not vendor slide decks. You leave able to specify a bonded joint on a drawing and defend it in a design review.

Ideal Learner

  • Product and mechanical engineers designing adhesive bonds into plastic assemblies
  • Manufacturing, process, and assembly engineers who own dispensing, fixturing, and cure operations
  • Supplier-quality and failure-analysis engineers investigating bond-line failures in the field
  • Materials and applications engineers specifying adhesives against OEM requirements
  • Industry segments: automotive OEM/Tier 1, medical devices, consumer products, electronics, appliance and industrial equipment

Learning Objectives

  • Decide rationally between bonding, welding, and mechanical fastening for a plastic joint, with the tradeoffs each choice commits the product to
  • Explain surface energy and wettability, read dyne-level values (e.g., 29, 31, 42 dyne/cm), and predict bondability of any plastic substrate on sight
  • Select and specify surface treatments — solvent wipe, abrasion, corona, plasma, flame — appropriate to the substrate and the bond requirement
  • Match adhesive chemistry (cyanoacrylate, epoxy, acrylic, polyurethane, silicone) to substrate, gap, speed, and environmental requirements using the Loctite selection tables
  • Design joint geometry that loads the adhesive in shear and compression and engineers peel, cleavage, and tension out of the joint
  • Distinguish adhesive from cohesive failure in a broken joint, interpret what each says about the design, and prescribe the fix
  • Plan cure processes, fixtures, and test protocols, and predict environmental durability (temperature, humidity, chemical) against service requirements

Consulting Sessions

Seminar attendees can sign up for individual consulting sessions with the instructor. Sessions are free for registered attendees, first-come first-served — sign up when registering by calling 248-539-0473 or during the seminar.

Seminar Outline

  • Bonding vs. welding vs. mechanical fastening: stress distribution, sealing, dissimilar materials, cosmetics, and rework
  • What bonding asks in return: surface control, process discipline, and fixture time
  • The cost picture: joint cost vs. failure cost across the product life
  • **Bonding Case Study: a fastened assembly converted to a bonded joint — what improved and what new risk arrived**
  • Surface energy vs. surface tension; contact angle and the wetting criterion
  • The dyne-level ladder: low-energy surfaces (29 dyne/cm and below), treatment targets, and printed/painted/bonded thresholds (31, 42 dyne/cm cases)
  • The hard-to-bond list: polyolefins, fluoropolymers, TPEs, and why their datasheets promise nothing about bonding
  • **Bonding Case Study: a low-energy substrate that would not wet — diagnosed by dyne pen, not by opinion**
  • **Exercise 1: rank a six-substrate list by bondability and state the treatment each needs before bonding**
  • Solvent wipe and abrasion: what they remove, what they cannot fix
  • Corona, plasma, and flame treatment: mechanism, dwell/effect decay time, and process control
  • Primers: when a primer is cheaper than a surface treatment line
  • Treatment verification and the decay clock between treatment and bonding
  • **Exercise 2: specify a treatment process (method, verification, time window) for a polypropylene housing bond**
  • Cyanoacrylates: speed, limitations, primer pairing, and impact/temperature modifiers
  • Epoxies: two-part and one-part, structural strength, gap filling, and cure schedules
  • Acrylics (structural/methacrylates): the dissimilar-substrate and surface-tolerance workhorse
  • Polyurethanes: flexibility, impact, and temperature range; silicones: sealing, stress relief, and temperature
  • Matching chemistry to substrate using the Loctite bonding-plastics tables (v5/v6); hot melts as fast structural options
  • **Exercise 3: from a requirements table (substrates, gap, cure speed, environment), select and defend an adhesive family**
  • Stress states: shear, tension, peel, cleavage — and why peel and cleavage destroy bonds at a fraction of shear strength
  • Joint geometries that work: lap, scarf, step, tongue-and-groove, V-groove, cylindrical/socket bonds
  • Overlap length vs. width; stress concentration at bond ends; compliant adhesive behavior in stiff joints
  • Managing mixed materials: CTE mismatch, flexural mismatch, and where the compliant family earns its keep
  • **Bonding Case Study: a lap joint that failed in peel during service — and the geometry change that fixed it**
  • **Exercise 4: redesign a butt-jointed bracket into a shear-loaded joint and quantify the margin change**
  • Adhesive failure vs. cohesive failure vs. substrate failure: what each diagnosis tells you to change
  • Cure mechanisms: moisture, anaerobic, two-part mix ratios, UV/heat cure; open time, fixture time, full cure
  • Dispensing and fixturing basics; test methods — lap shear, peel, durability testing and what each measures
  • **Bonding Case Study: mixed-mode failure in a returned assembly read correctly the second time**
  • **Exercise 5: classify three failure surfaces and prescribe the corrective action for each**
  • Temperature effects across adhesive families; thermal cycling and CTE-driven stress
  • Humidity and water immersion; chemical exposure and plasticizer migration
  • Writing the bond into the drawing: specification language, process control, and validation test plans
  • **Exercise 6 (capstone): full joint specification for a participant-supplied assembly — substrate treatment, adhesive selection, joint geometry, cure process, and validation tests — presented and critiqued**

More in Track C — Design, Molding & Tooling

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