Gluing with hot melt

gluing with hot melt can give a big improvement in production efficiency.

What is hot melt?

Hotmelt is a thermoplastic adhesive, because it is processed at approx. 160°C and then cools quickly, it is possible for this range of adhesives to require only 0.5 seconds to press a cardboard box, for example. This allows machines to work faster and be built more compactly.

Hot melt as a substitute for white cold glue

White cold adhesives have an almost identical bonding range to the series hot-melt adhesives available in the market. The differences are:

• Hotmelts have more filling power due to 100% solids
• Hot melts bind off faster
• Cold adhesives can penetrate deeper into cardboard
• Cold glues make less thick stacks in folded boxes
• Hotmelts adhere better to plastics

Hot melt as a substitute for sealant

In production environments in particular, it can be interesting to replace adhesive sealant with hot melt. Due to the sophisticated equipment required for hot melt, a simple hand gun is not as easy to handle as a hand kit gun. Hotmelts do offer numerous other advantages:

• Usually a favourable price per unit, e.g. Kg.
• Faster to process
• Easy to process.
• Like adhesive sealants, also have a sealing (sealant) effect.

Hot melt as a replacement for solvent-based adhesives

Hot melts can compete with solvent-based adhesives in almost all areas. Both types of glue are known for their fast action (short pressing time). Solvent-based adhesives have long been undesirable because of health and environmental concerns.

Types of hot melt

There are several types of hot melt available, the best known being types like EVA and Polyolefin, but PSA and PUR are also interesting product groups.