Body Shop Solutions

Through advanced technologies for the automotive body in white, Henkel helps automakers lose vehicle weight while keeping or improving performance and driving sustainability with environmentally friendly solutions and processes. 

Our advanced chemistry solutions demonstrate long-term durability and performance across substrates in key areas such as crash, noise vibration harshness, galvanic corrosion, and protection from external environmental influences. 

Key technologies for the automotive body shop include:

• Structural Adhesives
• Structural Inserts
• Acoustic & Sealant Solutions
• Structural Tapes & Panel Reinforcements

Within Henkel’s robust chemistry portfolio, automotive body shop solutions include automotive epoxy adhesives and automotive rubber adhesives – with each offering unique characteristics that drive suitability for varied vehicle application use.

Contact a member of our team today to find out more about Henkel’s Body Shop solutions

• Automotive epoxy adhesives offer high strength, ability to bond to oily metals & temperature resistance. Toughening agents can be added to make epoxies softer and better suited to absorb impact energy. Commonly used in Henkel’s portfolio of automotive structural solutions.
• Automotive rubber adhesives provide high elongation with significant flexibility for gap filling, sealing, and vibration damping. Automotive rubber adhesives are typically used for Henkel’s body shop sealant tapes to prevent water, dust, air, and sound from entering the passenger compartment. Also used in acoustic dampening applications, including Anti-Flutter & High Damping Foam and Liquid Applied Sound Deadeners. Our automotive rubber adhesives are fully compatible with paint and weld processes.

Structural Adhesives for Evolving Design & Manufacturing Needs

Today’s structural adhesives for automotive applications are known for their ability to overcome complex engineering challenges, including varying thermal expansions and electrical conductivities, in order to join a wide variety of multi-materials. Compared to traditional joining methods such as spot welds or rivets, structural adhesives deliver significant advantages, including:

• Corrosion resistance, providing an insulating barrier around the weld
• Improved crashworthiness, with up to a 35 percent increase in absorption
• Improved fatigue resistance
• Reduced noise, vibration, harshness through the use of viscoelastic materials
• Increased car body torsional stiffness

Henkel’s diverse portfolio of structural adhesives offer differentiated technologies for varying vehicle application needs – including high-impact, medium-impact and stiffening epoxy. The strong versatility and application in performance enable high bond strength to different substrates, long pot life and fast cure speed – with excellent tensile and shear strength and high viscosity for efficient application.

Custom modifications improve elongation, strength (epoxy toughening), flexibility, viscosity, and cure times to meet varying manufacturing requirements.

Cured Properties

• Advanced epoxy toughening technology enables bonded structures to absorb high impact energy across metals at varying temperatures, demonstrated through lap shear, t-peel strength, and impact wedge peel tests. During a crash event, this results in a highly efficient transfer of impact energy to the substrate – achieved across a wide range of temperatures and curing times in the e-coat oven.
• 100 percent cohesive failure across substrates
• High stress durability to ensure performance over the life of a vehicle

Uncured Properties

• Increased thixotropy and yield stress improve wash-off resistance, reducing contamination in the E-coat system while decreasing the need for costly re-works.
• Extended humidity resistance, meeting strength requirements after 3 months of humidity exposure, providing more processing flexibility.
• High flammability resistance, enabling high welding temperatures.

Design-in Solutions for Cost & Performance Optimization

In today’s automotive manufacturing environment, optimizing time and costs are vital to success.

The integration of material solutions into the advanced vehicle design process helps accomplish both of these goals, delivering maximum cost value, while ensuring performance standards are met or exceeded up front. When used to solve problems later in vehicle development, excess time and cost is spent.

Through a partnership with multinational engineering company, RLE International, called The Mobility Alliance, we bring engineering and material solutions together to fully optimize the design of automotive components and systems. 

From an engineering perspective, components and systems are reviewed to determine potential for metal downgauging or re-design of architecture to eliminate heavier parts. Thickness and part reduction play a particularly important role as each kilogram of weight savings equals significant OEM cost savings.

Henkel’s structural solutions are incorporated into weight optimized components or systems – using FEA and CAD analysis to produce and place material solutions exactly where they will be best optimized for material stiffness and crash protection. A range of structural solutions are considered and used, including structural inserts, structural tapes, structural adhesives, panel reinforcements, and more.

Once final CAD designs are complete, Henkel uses automotive 3D printing to enable faster speed in product development and testing – without having to wait for the creation of tools or sheet metal.

Structural inserts, in particular, can enable more than 40 kilograms in weight savings per vehicle if conventional all-metal components are replaced by hybrid designs using high-performance structural foam. Based on a combination of fiber reinforced plastics and specially developed high-performance structural expanding foam, structural inserts deliver high strength and stiffness across crash load scenarios, helping to improve car body torsional stiffness and crash performance.

Adaptable Solutions for Design Flexibility

The materials automotive designers are working with have evolved in recent years. Because of this, greater flexibility is needed now more than ever when it comes to material expansion, customized die cuts, and the ability to conform to different body contours and shapes.

Henkel offers a wide variety of structural solutions that work to strengthen, seal, and improve NVH performance across the vehicle - from the smallest joints and seams to large cavity sizes, metal panels, and vehicle support structures.

The integration of automotive lightweighting material combined with the increased use of sensitive battery components makes advanced automotive adhesive sealants & acoustics more important than ever. Henkel offers 2D and 3D sealing and acoustic solutions along with damping materials for the body shop that provide robust noise, vibration, harshness protection - while ensuring protection against water and other environmental elements that can disrupt passenger comfort and reduce vehicle performance. 

Learn more about our solutions, including acoustic sealing baffles, pumpable pillar filler, NVH tapes, body shop sealants, anti-flutter foam and high-damping foam here

Henkel offers epoxy-based structural adhesive tapes and structural foam tapes to help stiffen body panels, thin metal sections or high stress areas – ensuring performance and safety aren’t compromised as lightweight material is introduced.

• Structural adhesive tapes are provided as pre-formed extruded epoxy with low expansion during e-coat bake for smaller cavity sizes. Custom die cuts are available for design flexibility.
• Structural foam tapes are high expanding for mid- to large cavity sizes.

Henkel’s latest structural tape, TEROSON^® EP 1001, enables OEMs to further advance lightweighting efforts by delivering high expansion combined with high compressive strength - filling larger cavity sizes without increasing the amount of material needed. This provides a cost-effective alternative to using higher gauge steel for increased reinforcement, while continuing to meet or exceed performance standards.

Vehicle body panels with large surface areas, such as door outer panels, hoods, bodyside outers and roof panels, are often prone to oil canning or panel deformation. The increased use of aluminum coupled with more metal downgauging amplifies this challenge, making the panels weaker and in greater need of reinforcement.

Available as a sprayable or hand-applied solution, Henkel’s panel reinforcements provide a thin layer of application with a high reinforcing effect, stiffening metal panels to reduce oil canning and deformation. Both magnetic and non-magnetic options are available for increased application flexibility. Henkel’s magnetic version is tacky to improve non-cured adhesion to oily steel substrates with great wash off resistance.

Further Resources