Endurica forms partnership for adhesives research

FINDLAY, Ohio—Endurica L.L.C. is partnering with Michigan State University and Robert Bosch L.L.C. to move research forward on durability testing for adhesive bonds.

Endurica, a provider of elastomer durability and fatigue tests and software, will team up with Roozbeh Dargazany, an assistant professor of civil engineering at MSU, for the project, Endurica President Will Mars said.

Dargazany will be developing durability evaluation methods for adhesive joints during the three-year project. The models will be used to predict damage accumulation in polymeric adhesives. Endurica will integrate the developed testing and simulation methods with the company's existing fatigue solvers, Mars said.

"Our angle on it is the commercialization path," Mars said. "Once the research is completed, we're here to have something to speak to the adhesives space. Our current solutions really are not very well geared for adhesives. We look at this really as kind of part of our technology pipeline."

Dargazany has done research on similar durability modeling that Endurica's software is built on, and he and Mars have known each other's work for years, Mars said.

"I think he recognized that the kinds of things he wants to do are compatible in some ways with what we're doing. So it was one of those things where it just kind of makes sense, it's a natural extension of what we're both doing," Mars said.

The $1.5 million project is being jointly funded by the U.S. Department of Energy through a 2018 Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Award, Bosch and Endurica. The department's interest is in supporting and encouraging auto makers to continue lightweighting vehicles, Mars said.

"Adhesives are important, especially in automotive," Mars said. "There are a lot of places where people are replacing metal things with plastics and composites, where before, you could join metal things with a weld. You can't do that with plastics. You've got to find some way to glue them together, and that's where the adhesives come in."

A team from Robert Bosch GmbH and Bosch U.S. will collaborate with Dargazany on the research to develop the database on corrosion and reliability analysis of adhesive joints, according to an Endurica news release.

Dargazany and the Bosch representatives have proposed a new hybrid modeling technique that could help engineers monitor the specialized adhesives throughout the corrosion process with water, heat and sunlight, according to the release.

In the early stages of the process, Endurica will be participating in meetings and providing feedback on the research, and making sure that what's being developed is moving in a direction that can be eventually turned into a product, Mars said.

"First, our involvement is kind of advice, then later on, it turns into coding and developing friendly ways for people to use it, the workflows that people would need to take it and benefit from it," he said.

The larger target for Endurica would be using that data to develop a product that will be specialized for doing analysis on adhesive bonds, Mars said.

"Just like we compute durability for a bushing or a tire, somebody somewhere wants to calculate 'When I drive down this bumpy road, how long does this adhesive bond last?' The end goal is really to deliver a solution that will work for those as well," Mars said.

A user would run a model and get stress and strain data, and Endurica would provide information including how long the bond will last, failure mode and point of failure, he said. The same technology being developed for this project should also have some application for rubber-to-metal adhesive bonds.

"At the end of the day, our goal is to have a collection of tools that people can use for looking at durability problems in general," he said. "The technology that we develop in this project should also apply to those kinds of problems as well."