Use of a blast coating process to promote adhesion between aluminium surfaces for the automotive industry

The influence of surface roughness on adhesive bond strength for aluminium to aluminium bonding is investigated. firstly, the effect of varying surface roughness is investigated using grit-blast surface preparation. this is then compared to a novel ambient temperature blast coating technique known as coblast which, using a co-incident blast stream of abrasive and coating media, simultaneously removes a surface’s native passivation layer while depositing an active epoxy primer coating on the newly-exposed reactive metal surface. a range of al₂o₃ abrasive media with particle sizes from < 13 μm to < 1200 μm were used to prepare the varying surface roughness profiles. characterisation techniques such as surface profilometry, sem, edx, x-ray diffraction and light microscopy were used to investigate the level of coating coverage along with the degree of plastic deformation induced in the substrate as a result of the coating procedure. in addition, a modified lap shear test was conducted along with salt fog corrosion testing. results indicate that replacement of the grit-blast treatment with the epoxy coblast coating gives cohesive failure and an increase in lap shear strength of up to 15% before corrosion testing and up to 36% after 240 hours in a salt fog chamber.