At Bremer Bühnen GmbH, everything revolves around bonding. The company specialises in hot melt adhesives and, in addition to adhesives, also offers the right application equipment - a unique selling point in the industry. Recently, new software developed in-house has made the bonding process even safer.
Founded in 1922 as a small craft business in Bremen, the company is now in its third generation of family ownership. From a pure mechanical engineering company, it initially became a specialist in nailing and stapling technology. In the mid-1970s Stages into the area of bonding with hotmelt adhesives and since then has also developed the appropriate customised devices. This business area became the company's exclusive core business in the early 2000s.
„Today, we generate around 70 per cent of our sales with adhesives and 30 per cent with equipment technology. Bühnen offers its customers both from a single source, which sets it apart from other suppliers. Bonding in an industrial environment is not easy. You have to understand the process and the framework conditions precisely in order to select the right adhesive and apply it correctly. Let's take packaging as an example: some packaging has to withstand high temperatures, others have to survive in deep-freeze conditions - it all depends on the interaction between the adhesive and the application device, and we have mastered that.“
Jan Hunke, Managing Director and Partner
The company supports and advises its customers in the selection of equipment and hotmelt adhesives. for both automated and manual adhesive application. This is a great advantage for customers, as they only have one contact person for the entire bonding process.
Hot-melt adhesives are solvent-free, thermoplastic one-component adhesives that are melted by heating. Bühnen has stored around 3,900 different hot melt adhesives in its own database, whose range of services the adhesive specialist knows inside out.
„We can test these adhesives in our laboratory. Among other things, we test their performance on around 30 different substrates. A preselection in the database then makes it easier to find your way through the jungle of options. We then often carry out tests together with the customer in our application technology centre and create samples. Only then does the customer test an adhesive on their systems under real process conditions. This enables us to make an efficient selection.“
Christoph Zunder, Head of Adhesives and Technology
Each type of packaging places its own demands on the adhesive technology. For example, the adhesive technology specialist has developed its own test stand for deep-freeze packaging.
To make the automated gluing process simpler and even safer, the company recently has developed its own software for its HB-6000 piston pump devices. This allows customers to select the product to be used from preset adhesives. The software immediately sets the correct processing temperature. This makes an important contribution to the process reliability of the application. „An incorrectly set temperature often leads to problems. In most cases, the adhesive is then said not to work. In 95 per cent of cases, however, the error is due to the incorrect setting or other operating errors,“ says Christoph Zunder.
The software now provides all the information relevant to bonding at a glance. It has been installed as standard in all devices since the beginning of July - a feature that is available from Bühnen at no extra charge.
Sustainability is also important when it comes to bonding. „We have already been Adhesives with bio-based components in the portfolio. These are used, for example, when organic food or vegan food is packaged, but are also suitable for many other applications,“ says Christoph Zunder.
„A lot of expertise is required when developing and using adhesives with a bio content. For example, we need to know how heat-stable sustainable adhesives are and whether they can be recycled later. But you also need to know the recycling process.“
Bert Gausepohl, Managing Director and Partner
However, sustainability does not only mean using bio-based ingredients. It is also about energy consumption in the gluing process: So-called low-temperature adhesives, for example, reduce the processing temperature and therefore also the energy consumption. Just lowering the temperature from 170 °C to 120 °C means significant savings.
Bühnen is not only focussing on CO2reduction, recyclable hot-melt adhesives and bio-based components. Jan Hunke: „In addition, avoidance is of course particularly importantIf an application uses as little adhesive as possible, this is definitely in the interests of the environment. But it's also about emptying cartridges and much more. We still have a lot of ideas here.“
