Automotive
It’s not just about the substrates, it’s the space between them - that’s where innovation happens.
Henkel’s debonding-on-demand is more than just an innovative technology, it is a simple but powerful driver for circularity along the entire lifecycle of products. Enabling more efficient production, as well as the repair, reuse, repurpose and recycling of products and materials, debonding-on-demand helps customers across industries to achieve their sustainability goals.
With its broad portfolio, including structural adhesives, films, and tapes, Henkel offers the right solution for a wide range of applications and industries. All debonding technologies are designed to enable the controlled separation of bonded substrates by reducing the bond strength through specific triggers such as heat, electricity, or immersion. This allows for safe and efficient disassembly, while maintaining high bonding performance required during the use phase.
Product design
Production
Product use phase
End-of-life
Selecting the appropriate trigger depends on the application´s specific requirements. Henkel offers a comprehensive range of trigger types to support a wide spectrum of use cases.
Thermal trigger
Electrical trigger
Chemical trigger
- Wash-off Labels
- EV Batteries
- Headlamps
Adhesives designed with sustainability in mind ensure label integrity in use and easy wash-off during the recycling process.
Henkel’s water-based pressure sensitive adhesives are designed to support PET flake recycling. While conventional methods require an energy-intensive, high-temperature process to completely remove labels, this innovation offers excellent wash-off efficiency - even at 65°C for PE facestock. This ensures that labels can be easily removed from bottles using less energy, while increasing the purity and value of recycled PET.
Innovative debonding technologies that use specific triggers—such as heat or electricity—to enable the controlled separation of structural bonds.
Henkel’s advanced debonding-on-demand technology enables an easy release of even high-strength structural adhesives (up to 12 MPa). This simplifies the repair of battery modules, supports second-life reuse, and enhances recycling efficiency.
Henkel’s new debonding-on-demand solutions will enable fast, non-destructive removal of damaged headlamp units—without harming adjacent parts. Our debonding-on-demand technology will ease the repair burden by enabling component reuse, streamlined disassembly, and clean material recovery.
Henkel’s debonding-on-demand technology will help OEMs and suppliers reduce repair costs and achieve circularity goals. Enabling the repair of a damaged premium headlamp could reduce costs by more than 80% compared to full replacement. Debonding by thermal activation will enable clean separation of headlamp assemblies—preserving components and helping lower insurance premium.
Henkel’s debonding technologies go beyond joining materials; they empower industries to rethink product life cycles – to repair, reuse and recycle. Debonding-on-demand helps to keep the value of materials and products in the loop and move away from single-use consumption.
With Henkel’s expertise and close collaboration, customers can lead the way in advancing circularity, offering the solutions needed to meet today’s demands for more circular products.
Debonding-on-demand is an enabler for circularity. Circularity is a holistic concept with global relevance in a global market. The key to circularity at a product's end-of-life lies in its design. Debonding-on-demand enables the smart design of products with reduced resource use in mind, with options for modularity, repairability and extending lifecycles of products in the use phase and recovering the value of materials at end-of-life e.g., for medical equipment, textiles, packaging, construction products, electronic devices or automotive and transport.
Debonding-on-demand adhesives are – similar to other adhesives – applied between two substrates, which enable high bond strength with structural properties. If the bond is to be disassembled, e.g. at a product’s end-of-life or for repair purposes, a specific trigger is applied to perform the debonding process.
Debonding-on-demand adhesives' high performance and safety throughout a product's use phase is promoted by the right choice of adhesive technology and debond trigger. Thereby, debonding-on-demand adhesives provide the required performance for bonding materials, while allowing disassembly and material separation on demand to facilitate reuse, repair or recycling.
The preferred bonding and debonding techniques are material and application specific. Henkel supports customers to rethink circularity from the beginning of the product design phase to reduce resource consumption and to allow design for reuse, reparability, maintenance, and recyclability.
Get in touch with Henkel’s experts and start exploring advanced materials solutions today