You can not only use glue or tape to mount a speaker cone. Adhesive tape can even turn into loudspeaker membrane itself. And much more. You can cool, earth, set to mute and fly around the world with adhesive tape. We have compiled 11 fantastic examples for the use of adhesive tape.
How does adhesive tape catch crooks (without gagging them)?
Performance & capability of tapes
Taping is far from the only way to use adhesive tape. Here you can see 11 exciting examples of adhesive tape uses – besides taping.
Ultra-flat devices manage and regulate heat with sheets of graphite, which are able to absorb high temperatures and dissipate heat evenly over a relatively large surface. The graphite strips are affixed in place using a double-sided tape that does much more than simply stick. The thinner the tape, the better its thermal conductivity. In line with that physical principle, tesa offers extremely thin double-sided tapes that are just 5 µm (1 µm = 1/1000 mm) thick; it consists of a 2 µm thick backing and, on each side, a 1.5 µm coating of an acrylate adhesive mass developed by tesa.
The cooling adhesive tape
If you talk on your smartphone for so long that your ears get warm, then double-sided adhesive tape should come to mind. Not for your ears, but because you are already holding it in your hand when you phone. Double-sided adhesive tape in your smartphone ensures that it will not overheat. When used to the max, some parts inside there reach up to 90° C. So that nothing burns through, adhesive tapes divert heat and reduce the heat stress by 20° C in total.
We do not want to heat up your head with physics again, but we would like to briefly sketch out the physical principle that we use to our advantage here: The thinner the adhesive tape, the better its ability to conduct heat away from the source. We are even somewhat proud to say that tesa set a world record here. The thinnest tape in the world is made by us. It measures a total of 5 µm. As a matter of comparison, pull a hair from your head and hold it against the light. Your hair is ten times thicker than our adhesive tape.
The "electrical" adhesive tape
When a lot of electronics only has a small amount of space, this could lead to everything from voltage to short circuits. Adhesive tapes that discharge, protect and earth ensure the necessary conditions – also for the user. They glue just as reliably as other adhesive tapes. They also balance out electrical potential, discharge static charges and connect metallic conductor tracks and housing parts safely to each other. Nickel and copper are worked into the adhesive tape for this purpose. This kind of adhesive tape has another advantage for the electrical industry: it is suited for almost every area of application due to its minimal thickness and helps with every design.
The secret to their conductivity lies in the structure of the backings and adhesive masses. Electrically conductive adhesive tapes not only securely bond flexible printed circuits and metal housing parts, but also enable smooth functioning of complex circuits. The tapes equalize electrical potential while also discharging electrostatic charges, which prevents short circuits.
The exceptionally dense adhesive tape
Let us stick with electronics. Anyone who has heard of someone who knows someone who has a friend whose smartphone fell in the bathtub knows how damaging moisture is for electronic high-end devices. However, in the production of smartphones etc., we are speaking of very different quantities of moisture. Not of bathfuls of water, but of the finest steam that must not be allowed to enter into the device. For the production of smartphone displays, for example, the permitted amount of steam permeability is a 100,000th of what it is for the production of a milk carton.
What are known as barrier adhesive tapes help with this: at room temperature they seal the LEDs of a smartphone display for many years, preventing any moisture in the air from getting in. Special DrySeal® liner technology in the separating foil of the adhesive tape also ensures that the remaining moisture from the adhesive will be soaked up like a sponge during transport to the place of use.
The crystal clear adhesive tape
Touchscreens must be bright and extremely clear. And they also contain adhesive tape. Adhesive tape holds the screen reliably without letting it become foggy over the years. Such use of adhesive tape achieves 99% light permeability; it is highly transparent. To make sure that it remains like this, it is extremely UV-resistant. It can’t be bulky either: it is only 25 µm thin, that is 25/1,000 mm. You can only achieve such a performance in production under clean room conditions. The air in such a tesa production facility is 1,000 times cleaner than at the peak of a mountain – and we are speaking of a very high peak in a very unpopulated mountain with very, very pure air.
Clean room facility at tesa plant Hamburg: the air there is 1,000 times cleaner than the air at the top of a mountain.
The ringing adhesive tape
Adhesive tape is not only seen; it can also be heard. This happens if you make use of the extremely good attenuation properties of widely divergent and interwoven acrylate chains of molecules in the adhesive. This form of adhesive tape application is found above all in tiny loudspeakers in mobile phones etc., which do not only have to transmit speech perfectly, but also challenging tones and sounds. The acrylate adhesive is in a three layer construction between two high performance films. While the high performance films produce a high amount of rigidity, the adhesive contributes its flexibility to the sound – with a total thickness of 22 µm to 60 µm. And sometimes, taping a speaker cone is no emergency repair, but actually something really high-tech.
The anti-rattling adhesive tape
Before a new car becomes a used car, a few years must pass. During these years, you would like to enjoy each individual trip from beginning to end. Nothing should rattle in the car and drown out the sounds of the radio. Even with 200 things on the motorway, tesa has an entire range of products for using adhesive tape in a car. The adhesive tapes reduce or prevent annoying sounds, vibrations, squeaking or the rattling of car parts.
A prerequisite of driving comfort and a quality feature for every vehicle is driving without background noise. tesa offers a range of specially developed products to prevent vibrations, squeaking and rattling.
tesa PrioSpot®: The unique hybrid technology reliably protects high-quality original products against counterfeiting and trading on the grey market.
The anti-counterfeiting adhesive tape
Adhesive tape can hold together more than just what belongs together. Special adhesive labels can even say exactly what belongs to whom and whether the thing that you see is actually genuine. A unique technology developed by tesa's subsidiary tesa scribos makes it possible to write information by laser on a label and on four levels so that it carries visible information and also information only readable with special reading devices.
The tesa PrioSpot®, as the label is called, can unambiguously label products like a finger print – and offers the highest amount of security against counterfeiting and pirate products. It can also be combined with RFID chips, bar codes or QR codes. This lets everyone in the supply chain, from the production facility to the logistics company, the customs authorities, retailers and end consumers, check at any time whether the product is an original. All you need is a mobile phone to authenticate it.
The long-distance adhesive tape
Sometimes adhesive tapes simply like to travel. An adhesive tape from tesa has made it to space. The "tesa® Secure Laser Label," actually developed as a vehicle ID label for cars, circled the earth on the outside shell of the international space station ISS for a whole 495 days – and was therefore in space for almost 60 times longer than Neil Armstrong. But such a high-performing adhesive tape naturally did not have time to enjoy the sights: it had to endure extreme fluctuations in temperature, the vacuum, ultraviolet waves, colliding micrometeorites and the finest space debris – and it passed the test. All the information that was written on the label could still be read on the 500th day.
It's not the same as being in space, but on a car, too, tesa® Laser Labels have to prove their enduring resistance against adverse conditions.
King Penguin with GPS tracker attached with tesa tape.
The waddling adhesive tape
Finally, it is back down to earth again. In the southern hemisphere the last of many adhesive tape applications awaits: a tesafix foam adhesive tape has had to overcome very different challenges. That is because our adhesive tape has been on the go for the sake of research for many years. It has waddled about with the Humboldt and Magellanic Penguins and their small GPS trackers on the Falkland islands for more than 20 years. The trackers are attached to them by tape. In this case, the most important property of the adhesive tape is that it does not damage the birds' feathers. And following on from that, it must of course be resistant to salt water and ice cold temperatures.
