Pune, India – Hot-melt adhesives derived from renewable resources pose challenges: it is difficult to retain good adhesive performance while also allowing biodegradability. Now, a team at the CSIR-National Chemical Laboratory in Pune have created reusable hot-melt adhesives with up to 90% biobased content and tunable adhesive properties.
They manage to tailor the monomer composition to create non-isocyanate polyurethane adhesives with an adhesion strength of 6.39MPa, which they believe is the highest adhesion strength that has been seen for a biobased thermoplastic non-isocyanate hot-melt adhesive when bonding with an aluminium substrate.
The adhesives also showed good reusability after three bonding and debonding cycles, with no significant drop in adhesive strength. Adhesion was also good in wet conditions, and they were prone to degradation under acid conditions.
They believe the materials have potential as environmentally friendly, degradable, reusable adhesives with good adhesive strength.
The work has been published in the journal ACS Applied Polymer Materials.
