New high-tech adhesives are currently top of the list for carmakers as they look for ways to make cars lighter and tougher, according to a story by Reuters.
For suppliers like Henkel, PPG and Atlas Copco, providing tailor-made adhesives that can absorb the shock of a crash and reduce rattles allows them to push for higher prices - and make more profits.
Stricter emissions rules in major markets mean cars have to become more fuel-efficient. Car companies are therefore using more aluminium and exotic composites. That puts industrial adhesives - made up of chemicals like the polyolefins that are used in Croc shoes and tennis racket strings - at the top of carmakers' shopping lists.
Henkel, the world's largest maker of adhesives, is selling off divisions that deal with simpler industrial glues to focus on more complex and specialist products used on cars, airplanes or mobile phones.
The margin for its adhesive technologies division stood at 16.5 percent in the first quarter, outperforming the group as a whole, which had a margin of 14.9 percent.
NEW IDEAS
Although European car sales are this year headed for a sixth straight annual decline, global auto sales may surge 28 percent to 102 million cars by 2018, fuelled by growth in Asia and North America, according to research firm IHS Automotive.
The 2-3 billion-euro market for automotive adhesives currently accounts for less than 10 percent of the global adhesives market, but industry experts forecast the amount of glue used in an average car may grow by at least a third over the next 5-10 years, from around 15 kg now.
Audi's top-of-the-line R8, for example, is in large part fastened by advanced structural adhesives which have also been developed to withstand racetrack vibrations and fierce heat.
"We don't buy glues off the peg but work very closely together with manufacturers on complex specific adhesive applications," said Michael Zuern, head of materials engineering at Mercedes-Benz at Mercedes-Benz.
Sweden's Atlas Copco entered the auto adhesives segment in 2011 through the acquisition of German company SCA-Schucker.
"It's one of the product areas with the strongest growth since it's driven by new techniques all the time, and the car makers' new ideas," said Mats Rahmstrom, head of the group's business area Industrial Technique.
Producers like Alcoa expect to more than triple sales of aluminium sheet to carmakers by 2015.
Bernd Mlekusch, head of technology development at Audi, said the proliferation of lightweight composites may cause the amount of glue used in an Audi vehicle, which is often illustrated by carmakers in the total length of bonding substance used rather than weight, to swell to a length of 150 metres in coming years from 100 metres currently.
Because adhesive bonding increases the stiffness of the body shell, the vehicle can better absorb bumps and in-car noise is dampened, Mercedes' Zuern told Reuters. It also makes for better handling and helps absorb the impact of a crash.
GM's new CTS sedan uses 118 metres of structural adhesives, more than the length of a soccer field, helping to make the vehicle 40 percent stiffer than its predecessor.
PPG’s Andrew Christie said there were fracture-toughened adhesives on the market which could absorb the energy of an impact far more efficiently than standard adhesives or even spot welds.
"One of the key things to surviving a crash is that the structure should absorb the impact and not you or I," he said.