We manufacture a construction tube and are concerned about the glue temp. It’s about 40d in the plant and has been told that the glue is to cold. What temp should it be?
- The adhesive will perform best at room temperature or higher.
- There are several types of adhesives used to manufacture cores. In order to answer this question. The composition of the adhesive has to be known. Is it based on polyvinyl acetate, polyvinyl acohol, dextrin, or sodium silicate? Whatever it is, I am not surprised that it doesn’t work at 40 Degrees F. I suggest the company asking the question go to their supplier and ask for the optimum application temperature.
- Solution and emulsion adhesives are typically intended to be run around ‘room temperature’. It’s understood that that will not always be the case, but when there are drastic deviations from this, many things can be affected: emulsion stability, set speed, and viscosity are probably the most important. At very low temperature, viscosity will increase dramatically, leading to difficulty controlling application amount; adhesive will not set as fast, since paper surface gets denser and since it takes more energy to flash water off; at very low temperatures, emulsion adhesives will ‘break’, which means the suspended resin will coagulate. This is non-reversible, and means the adhesive has become unusable.Most of these issues can be accommodated by choosing an adhesive whose properties are suited for low-temp use (i.e. thinner, faster set speed). However, 40F is probably approaching the point at which your emulsion will break. It would be good practice to leave more of a buffer. Store adhesive containers in a warmer area, and add some ambient heaters to the area around the gluepots.