Articles techniques et présentations

The lamination of substrates with thin coatings is commonly used in furniture, automotive and avionic industries. In the lamination process the hot melt adhesives are widely used and typically activated at temperatures from 80°C to 140°C by resistive heating. This requires a heat transfer through the coating and/or the substrate. To make the process more flexible, to decrease its energy consumption and to shorten the processing time, the replacement of conventional heating by a volumetric and selective microwave heating is investigated in the present work. We neglect thermodynamic interactions between neighboring glue domains. An optimization of the boundary condition at the upper side of the vacuum bag and the thermal properties of the coating material allow to achieve the targeted temperature profile in the investigated sandwich structure for a time shorter than 60 s.