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Environmentally Friendly Adhesives for Optical Components

Christine L. Grahl A water-soluble adhesive is helping high-tech companies streamline their machining and finishing processes while meeting strict environmental standards. Several years ago, Horizon Photonics Inc. was struggling with labor costs and product quality in its dicing operations. The then California-based producer of optical components and technologies* noticed that it was spending an inordinate amount of time cleaning the dicing adhesive from its optical components. “An operator had to inspect each tiny optic under a stereoscope and clean them all individually, so it was quite a bottleneck in our process,” says Matt DeRemer, process engineer. “Additionally, our optics are laminated, and the acetone we used for cleaning and debonding was also attacking the adhesive we used for lamination.” The main problem was the adhesive used to hold the products in place during the dicing and machining operations. Although the adhesive worked well and had a sufficient amount of bond strength, harsh chemicals and lengthy processing steps were required to remove the adhesive from the components after the dicing and machining operations were complete. Additionally, the company had to carefully control the use, storage and disposal of these chemicals to ensure employee safety and avoid violating any Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) or Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations. “We were throwing a lot of time and money into the cleaning process, and that was digging into our profit margin and holding us back from taking on new product orders,” explains DeRemer. “We knew we had to find a solution.”

A Water-Soluble Alternative

In Camarillo, CA, a chemist and a project engineer had recognized this problem in the mid-’90s and began developing an alternative. Their research led to the introduction of a new water-soluble thermoplastic adhesive, called AquaBond—and a new company, AquaBond Technologies—in 1998. “The company’s founders realized that ceramic and glass manufacturers were looking for a way to temporarily bond products so that when they debond them, they don’t have to introduce them to a hot isopropyl alcohol (IPA), methyl ethyl ketone (MEK) or acetone bath. The chemist decided to try to rearrange the molecules of conventional adhesives so that the adhesives could be debonded with hot water—