In industrial terms, adhesive bonding technology is undoubtedly the technology of the 21st century. There is practically no artisan or industrial sector which, when using adhesives, does not do so in innovative ways.
Products used as industrial glues are now high quality, manufactured in compliance with strict standards referring to bonding processes, “defined” by Manufacturers, which through the correct development and use of these adhesives – right from the stages of designing the product for bonding – aims for a “zero defect” production process.
This tendency clashes with the fact that in reality bonded joints, unfortunately and all too often, do not satisfy the requisites attributed to them, turning out to be vulnerable when commissioned and operative.
From an objective viewpoint, roughly 90% of bonding errors are caused by lack of knowledge of the technique for carrying out the application of bonding adhesives.
The users of the adhesives naturally think that they have executed the process correctly (who would knowingly make a mistake?) and therefore automatically blame the damage on the glue:
“It’s the adhesive’s fault!”
This is the real problem, i.e. that the adhesives produced to lead to zero error manufacturing suffer from their defective application.
To prevent this, the new DIN 2304 Standard does its best to confront this issue: addressing the key factors whereby adhesive bonding defects are not due to the adhesive but to problems generated during the application of the adhesives, the phase that needs to be improved.
The DIN 2304 Standard is consequently an instrument for guiding the personnel who actually carry out the bonding operation, and its specific goal is to organise the entire bonding process, to the point where the adhesive operator plans and “organises” the operation in the most effective and reproducible way, from the initial idea to the development and manufacture of the product to be bonded.
The DIN 2304 Standard also has a more general aim, namely to improve the objective perception of adhesive bonding, in order to promote further employment of this technology.
The Standard was drawn up bearing in mind the need to exhaustively illustrate the many aspects of bonding through a single Standard covering all its very different areas of application ranging from industrial manufacture to individual craftsmanship.
Industrial production generally involves either a single extremely large item or a series involving thousands of identical parts. Artisan contexts usually concern a limited series or a single artefact.
The DIN 2304 Standard is useful and applicable, for example, in cases where the different requisites typical of large-scale production are applied to a product bonded and created as a single item or a very limited series.
This is why the DIN 3204 Standard is deliberately intended to cover all possible kinds of adhesives, substrate materials and joints and bonds.
To further meet the specific needs of different operators, in the near future specific guidelines will be drawn up and integrated with the DIN 2304 Standard.
