Welding of selected dissimilar polymers via matching viscosity through dual temperature infrared and hot plate heating

Welding of dissimilar polymers is becoming more common. While joining of dissimilar polymers is traditionally accomplished via the use of adhesives or mechanical methods such as fasteners, snap fits, and staking, these approaches cannot always be effectively applied. For these applications, where adhesives and mechanical bonding cannot be used, it may be possible to directly weld or bond polymers that are miscible but have different material properties via welding techniques. In this work, infrared welding was used to join acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) to polyphenylene oxide (PPO), and hot plate welding was used to join ABS to polyvinyl chloride (PVC), and polystyrene (PS) to polycarbonate (PC) as an initial investigation into a new approach to bonding dissimilar polymers. Through the use of targeted heating to match the polymer viscosities to each other, the weld strength was improved by up to three times and, when optimized, the strength of the dissimilar bond as equivalent to that of the similar material weld.