The Henkel BONDERITE® Flex process aids automakers and suppliers in efficient aluminium use to make their automotive products more lightweight.
Global Market Strategy Head - Surface Treatment General Industry
All automakers are facing the challenge of reducing their CO2-emissions and improving their sustainability. An important building block of their strategy is weight reduction, achieved by using more lightweight materials, such as aluminium. However, the high amounts of aluminium used lead to challenges such as sludge, that need innovative process solutions.
The Henkel BONDERITE® Flex process is key in helping automakers and suppliers use more aluminium in their efforts to make their automotive products more lightweight.
Henkel Flex is a two-step metal pretreatment process and a new variation of the traditional zinc phosphate process. The process offers long-term sustainability, added value and higher productivity.
Aluminium is a highly challenging material because it is very active. When you use traditional zinc phosphate to treat aluminium, it creates large amounts of sludge in the phosphate tank. This sludge causes rough surfaces, paint defects and can lead to paint adhesion issues, resulting in time-consuming maintenance needed to remove the sludge from the process. But what about creating a new process avoiding aluminium sludge formation altogether?
Creating two-thirds less sludge, Henkel's Flex process is much better to treat high amounts of aluminium than traditional zinc phosphate. The Henkel Flex process, as the term would imply, is flexible: it can go from zero to 85% aluminium without changing anything in the process. Henkel Flex has proven its superb capabilities already for several years in the industry, providing less waste and enabling our customers to run high shares of aluminium substrate through their existing pretreatment lines. The patented process even won the Automotive News Pace Award in 2014.
The increasing amount of Al components, especially for emerging electrical vehicles, is an additional challenge for pretreatment lines. The video above is a prime example from one of our customers, the ALRO Group in Belgium, that successfully addressed this challenge using the Henkel Flex process to coat high volumes of large aluminium battery housings on their existing pretreatment line, while maintaining the flexibility to also treat other substrates.
Contact us for more details on the Flex Process and our comprehensive portfolio of metal pretreatment products.
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