Until now, nails have
been used to hold the individual components together. Now an adhesive tape has
been developed to perform this task.
A finished house
stands on what just a few days ago was an empty green field. Such a feat is
possible thanks to components that are industrially prefabricated in a
manufacturing plant for finished parts and then simply need to be assembled on
the building site -- "prefabricated houses" in other words.
We've developed an
adhesive tape that sets in under a minute to reliably and durably bond together
the individual components," says Dr. Andreas Zillessen, a scientist at the
WKI. "The adhesive sets at the push of a button, so to speak. This means
that when we apply the adhesive tape when assembling components, we can wait as
long as we like without the adhesive drying out, as other kinds of adhesive
would."
The secret is inside
the material itself: unlike ordinary adhesive tape, it does not consist merely
of a backing material and adhesive -- it also has its own "heating
system." This is a metal strip that is coated with adhesive on both sides.
If you want to stick together two strips of wood, you place the adhesive tape
in the right position, put the strips of wood in place, and then let an
electrical current flow through the metal strip. The metal heats up, and the
adhesive melts and binds to the wood. First the adhesive is turned liquid by
the heat so that it gets into the pores in the wood; then it sets very quickly
once it cools. "At present, the gluing and setting combined take around a
minute, but over the long term we want to make these processes significantly
shorter," explains Zillessen.
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