TPE Two Component Processing

Thermoplastic elastomers are bonded to engineering plastics by melt adhesion to the most widely used structural plastics. Since the materials are bonded together at the production stage, no separate adhesive is needed, which makes the process faster and more cost effective than if the two parts were assembled together after each had been produced separately. There are two main processing procedures used to achieve bonding, overmoulding and co-extrusion. When overmoulding with soft components, the surface of the hard component softens and a diffusion of the molecules in the outer layer takes place. A prerequisite for this is that the two materials, i.e. the TPE Compound and the engineering plastic, must be compatible with one another, meaning that they must not reject one another’s molecules. As the molecule mobility increases, the molecules of the two materials will diffuse and this gives rise to so called melt adhesion. The molecules of the two materials form a network at the surfac