Significance of Adhesion Theories in Area of Flexible Bonded Structural Joints in Construction Sector

Abstract

The issue of bonding has been a part of humanity throughout its history. The greatest development in this area occurred in the second half of the 20th century and the issue of bonding has gained a lot of interest from the scientific community. Over the past 80 years, there has been a significant increase in scientific research and grants aimed at defining adhesion. We now know that examining the adhesion of materials, determining the adhesive properties or simply evaluating the test results and assessing the failure of the test specimens is not possible without understanding the basic principles and theories of bonding, i.e. adhesive joining. The presented paper is focused on the description of fundamental adhesion theories and their usage in the field of structural bonding in construction industry. The importance of understanding to adhesive properties of used products is demonstrated on an example of four different surfaces in combination with representatives of high strength flexible adhesive systems intended for façade applications. Representatives with high surface polarity, medium-high polarity and low polarity were deliberately selected. The one-way ANOVA was performed to analyse the impact of surface adhesive properties on adhesion of bonded joints. It was confirmed that the riskiest is bonding of polymer-based materials. For all selected materials it was concluded that the hypotheses of the adsorption theory, which, to some extent, also includes the assumptions of other adhesive theories, seem to be the most fundamental for the presented researched area.The issue of bonding has been a part of humanity throughout its history. The greatest development in this area occurred in the second half of the 20th century and the issue of bonding has gained a lot of interest from the scientific community. Over the past 80 years, there has been a significant increase in scientific research and grants aimed at defining adhesion. We now know that examining the adhesion of materials, determining the adhesive properties or simply evaluating the test results and assessing the failure of the test specimens is not possible without understanding the basic principles and theories of bonding, i.e. adhesive joining. The presented paper is focused on the description of fundamental adhesion theories and their usage in the field of structural bonding in construction industry. The importance of understanding to adhesive properties of used products is demonstrated on an example of four different surfaces in combination with representatives of high strength flexible adhesive systems intended for façade applications. Representatives with high surface polarity, medium-high polarity and low polarity were deliberately selected. The one-way ANOVA was performed to analyse the impact of surface adhesive properties on adhesion of bonded joints. It was confirmed that the riskiest is bonding of polymer-based materials. For all selected materials it was concluded that the hypotheses of the adsorption theory, which, to some extent, also includes the assumptions of other adhesive theories, seem to be the most fundamental for the presented researched area.