New Priming Technology Adhesion Performance of UV-Curable Coatings on Plastic

By Sebastien Villeneuve, Jean-Pierre Wolf, Thomas Bolle, Giorgio Macor, Gabriele Stipan, Martin Kunz, Michael Bauer

Plastic substrates often offer an unfriendly surface for coating applications, resulting in insufficient adhesion of applied coatings, inks, and adhesives. This paper presents a new priming process which overcomes the problem of poor adhesion of ultraviolet (UV)-curable coatings on plastic surfaces.

In this process, the plastic surface is activated by a plasma or corona treatment and then a special primer composition is applied as a thin layer to form a covalently attached primer. The thermally stable primer layer contains latent groups, which can react with the UV-curable coating under UV light exposure. This novel process produces significantly enhanced adhesion to plastic substrates. Experimental results, applications examples, and perspectives are discussed further.