With the automotive safety and lighting industry quickly making the transition from incandescent vehicle lamps to LED-based lighting, robust protection materials in the form of printed circuit board conformal coatings and advanced potting materials are critical for the performance and reliability of these products. Potting materials, specifically, must deliver superior environmental resistance and excellent long-term material integrity to ensure the proper function and safety of the products for which they are designed.
A pioneer in the vehicle lighting and safety market, Grote Industries recently selected a Hysol® brand Henkel potting material to enable a new automated LED lamp assembly line capable of producing over 1 million parts per year. In addition to advanced in-field performance characteristics, Grote also required a potting material with very fast flow and cure rates, so that it could be easily integrated into the company’s new, highly automated production line without slowing cycle times.
“We evaluated over 80 materials from 11 different vendors,” says Ed Sitarski, product development engineer for Grote Industries. “With over 19 different engineering requirements, formulating just the right potting material to meet all of our stringent criteria was no easy feat.” Among the materials criteria are:
- low viscosity,
- self-leveling characteristics to minimize air entrapment,
- improved thermal conductivity and increased cooling capacity to enable greater light intensity and longer life,
- UL94 V0 fire resistance approval,
- environmental safety and friendliness.
Meeting Tough Standards
“These are tough standards to meet,” comments Sitarski, “but after a lengthy 15-month evaluation and development process, Henkel’s Hysol family of custom formulated potting materials emerged as the clear winner and we are now running this product successfully in production.”
While Henkel manufactures a variety of commercially available potting materials for applications ranging from control modules to sensors to transformers to LED lighting, the partnership with Grote necessitated a custom-formulated material for the lighting specialist’s very specific requirements.
“From a technical perspective, formulating a material that complied with all 19 of the engineering criteria was quite challenging,” says Rob Eccles, North American automotive electronics sales manager for Henkel’s electronics group. “This is a prime example of how both customer ingenuity and supplier product expertise can come together to yield ground-breaking results. Our R&D team worked in close collaboration with the engineering team at Grote to formulate a product for their demanding requirements.”
The Henkel material also had to be extremely versatile, as Grote’s line includes 10 different product families with numerous color and pack variants, constituting a total of more than 60 part numbers. The parts also vary in size and shape -- from 2-4 in. in diameter with rectangular lamp parts ranging from approximately 1 x 1.5 in. to 2 x 5 in. The Hysol brand material had to be formulated for universal use with all of these various parts.
Superior Products, Increased Efficiency
“The ability to fully automate our lamp assembly has enabled us to produce superior LED products with nearly a 35% reduction in cycle time as compared to the manual assembly process we were using previously,” says Sitarski. “With this increased efficiency, Grote has been able to reallocate its third shift labor in 2007 to other shifts or work areas.”
Grote plant manager Tom Blades concurs with Sitarski’s assessment of the return on investment afforded by the Henkel solution.
“Material savings alone easily paid for the robot cells,” he says. “We also had direct labor savings, quality improvements, and enhanced aesthetics.”
Grote’s new award-winning automated LED lamp assembly line is producing a variety of exterior vehicle LED marker lamps under the company’s SuperNova™ trademark. The new Henkel-enabled line of advanced lighting will be used in major trucking fleets, agricultural products, boating trailers, and a variety of other types of transport equipment.
“Henkel’s unique potting solution was critical to our success and will help ensure the safety of motorists, agricultural specialists, and sporting enthusiasts everywhere,” concludes Sitarski.