In the automobile industry, the need for weight reduction is growing due to the reinforcement of environmental regulations and the trend of conversion to electric vehicles. Accordingly, along with the application of lightweight materials, the applicat...
In the automobile industry, the need for weight reduction is growing due to the reinforcement of environmental regulations and the trend of conversion to electric vehicles. Accordingly, along with the application of lightweight materials, the application of adhesives is also increasing. In the past, car body adhesive was cured with hot air in the oven of painting shop, but recently, car body direct heating method to cure the adhesive is expanding. Among various heat sources, the induction heating method is widely applied, because it has the advantage of rapid heating ability without contacting the parts.
Direct heating method requires careful management to prevent damage to panels and adhesives because the heating rate is fast and heat is concentrated in local area. In general, the industry is trying to maintain quality through temperature measurement and control, but since temperature conditions could be changed due to product deviation and environmental changes, there are many difficulties in quality control method through temperature. With this background, research on methods of direct curing state measurement have been steadily progressing.
Recently, research on the electrochemical analysis method (EIS, Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy) using the correlation between chemical bonding and electrical impedance of the adhesive is going on actively.
The EIS analysis method that has been carried out so far measures the impedance change with separately applying AC Signal to the bonded specimen. But, in the induction heating method, it is difficult to measure and analyze the impedance changes affected only by the applied AC Signal because high-frequency noise is generated by the induction heating. Therefore, in this study, a method of analyzing the induced voltage generated by the induction heating was studied for measuring the curing state without applying a separate AC Signal.
In this paper, an induction heating circuit suitable for measuring the adhesive curing state was constructed, and the change in induced voltage due to factors other than adhesive curing was first confirmed. Next, a method for determining the time of curing start and curing completion was presented by measuring the change in induced voltage according to the curing of the adhesive and analyzing the pattern. Finally, the reliability of the induced voltage change analysis method was verified by shear strength evaluation and DSC(Differential Scanning Calorimetry) analysis.