Schmitz Cargobull AG: Structural Adhesive Bonding
Since 2003 Schmitz Cargobull AG, Europe's leading trailer manufacturer pretreats annually over 15000 refrigerated semitrailers with Openair® plasma before their structural bonding. The previously manually performed tasks of surface cleaning and roughening were to be replaced by an industrial process. The primary objective was to completely eliminate organic solvents and thereby to exclude the potential risk of environmental pollution.
Application
The refrigerated trailers feature a self-supporting system, a modular structure which is built completely void of rivets. Walls and ceilings of the semitrailers consist of a sandwich structure. This is a vapor diffusion-tight panel with two plastic-coated steel plate surface layers and an interposed high-density polyurethane hard foam core. The self-carrying characteristic is created by adhesive bonding of the large-size panel into angled aluminium rails. For achieving extremely good adhesion and particularly tight sealing of the bonding joints, the panels are previously pretreated with atmospheric pressure plasma in the area of the surfaces to be bonded. The coatings are mainly duroplasts which are given new adhesive-friendly surface properties by plasma activation.
The plasma installation consists of two nozzle systems with four rotary nozzles which are offset to each other. The nozzles distribute the plasma at a 45° angle, with a treatment width of 47mm per nozzle. Depending on the direction, 150-180mm of the surface can now be cleaned and activated in a single pass on a minimum width of 300 mm and over the entire length or width of the panel.
Benefits
Openair® plasma offers the user the following values:
- Environmentally friendly manufacturing method
- Complete elimination of organic solvents in the bonding process
- Annual savings of approx. 20t of wet chemicals
- Space-saving application of the plasma installation
- High process safety
- Improved adhesion and tightness of the bonding joints
- Rationalization of the manufacturing process through elimination of work steps
- Exclusion of environmental impacts at the workplace
- Operating cost reduction
Schmitz Cargobull AG
www.cargobull.com
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