Bond PTFE and Metals Together

Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) provides excellent thermal stability, electrical insulation, chemical resistance, and resistance to arc tracking. These properties make PTFE an excellent material for broad applications in aircraft, military, medical and other areas. However, it is extremely hard to adhere on a PTFE surface because of its unique non-polar, symmetric, and high crystalline structure and very low surface tension. Without surface treatments, adhesives generally have bad wettability, difficulty to form entanglement and lack of interaction forces. Bonding PTFE to metals is even more challenge due to their total different surface properties. Surface energies of metals are about 50 times higher than that of PTFE (~1J/m² vs. 0.02J/m²). However, industries need new solutions for bonding them together by using adhesives instead of riveting, screwing and other joint technologies to prevent drilling holes and using hazard chemicals in field. There is no commercial available product that can bond PTFE to metals together with high service temperature and good fluid resistance. TE recently developed a series of innovated novel high temperature hot-melt adhesives that can strongly bond PTFE and metals together without surface treatment. The preliminary results have demonstrated that these new adhesives can bond PTFE to PTFE, metals to metals and PTFE to metals with very good bonding strength without any surface treatment. These adhesives can service at high temperatures and are expected to have great fluid resistance due to principle of formulation design.