Henkel´s Adhesive Technologies business provides material science and scientific knowhow to create value for our customers. How? By offering them a fast track to market entry. Leveraging advanced data analytics, our product developers can boost efficiency and effectiveness towards customized adhesive solutions. It’s a double-win situation for our customers: They gain a competitive advantage on their product and speed up their return on investment.
Success Story
Better products faster
Short on time? Dive into the key chapter of your interest:
Accelerating speed-to-market
When our industrial customers need an adhesive solution that does not readily exist on the market, our product developers get into action. Their challenge: when inventing new materials, they often need to juggle more than a dozen raw materials and meet even more customer requirements at the same time. For a battery adhesive such requirements do include viscosity, flow behavior, initial and final adhesion, elasticity, and resistance to environmental impact, which are only one part of the equation. Other, more universal asks, include sustainability requirements (such as the carbon footprint of all raw materials), health & safety concerns, and of course cost criteria. The result: a multidimensional set of data that is more than the human mind can easily cope with.
This is where advanced data analytics comes in. Just like a magnifying glass, they make structures in data visible long before the human eye can detect them, highlighting levers to control the performance of a materials formula. Beyond that Advanced Data Analytics can suggest new formulation accounting for utilizing the multidimensional set of data. This data analysis helps avoiding tedious and time-consuming trial-and-error loops.
But how do the algorithms know which of the solutions is likely to be successful? Experience is the answer. Henkel’s data analysts can help adhesive developers to utilize information of millions of previous experiments carried out in Henkel labs all over the world. Taking those data and combining them with the domain knowledge of the developer, data analysts can train models suggesting new promising mixture. In concrete examples new material formulations, proposed by our algorithms, show an average success rate of 38 percent (vs. 8 percent in manually designed experiments).
In that way, our product development creates fast customized solutions for a wide range of industries: from automotive, to electronics, to packaging, or even consumer goods such as diapers. Creating value for our customers, we help to make them stay ahead of the pack.
Case study: Faster development of longer life electric vehicles (EV) batteries
A well-known automotive supplier, an innovation leader in its field, relies on an intelligent mix of materials to set trends in production technology and sustainability. When the automotive supplier needed a customized thermal gap filler for its newly developed electric car batteries, the company turned to adhesives specialist at Henkel.
The challenge for the product developers: To create a formulation that reconciles conflicting properties: The thermal gap filler needed to have high thermal conductivity to dissipate the heat that batteries generate during operation. And it needed to be easily castable in the production process. And here is the hook: mixing the polymer material with thermally conductive fillers helps to increase the thermal conductivity value, while making it difficult to process because it increases viscosity.
Henkel’s thermal management specialists teamed up with their advanced data analytics colleagues to find the perfect balance between thermal conductivity and processing capabilities. Leveraging the huge Henkel data base and domain know-how, they were able to interpolate a solution fast and presented their formulation to the customer after only one round of iteration.
The thermal gap filler is now used to produce longer life EV batteries. The speed of our product development helped the automotive supplier to accelerate its own development and value creation.
Employing advanced data analytics is like moving from hand-operated to machine-powered tools for the mind. For product development it means ‘better products faster’.
Dr. Marc Hamm, Senior Manager Digital Twins & Advanced Data Analytics, Adhesive Technologies at Henkel
Advancing the innovation dynamics
Digitalization is a key driver to translate know-how and technology expertise into fast and impactful innovations, addressing the challenges of customers, partners, and future generations. In the area of advanced data analytics, we are tackling a wide scope of different applications:
- An insulating Polyurethane foam for windows
- Thermal gap fillers for EV batteries
- A packaging adhesive that provides an easy opening and a sealing function for shipments to online customers
- An EV battery coating that protects against voltage flashover
- A sealant for high-speed train windows
- An adhesive for loud speaker coils
- A sustainability project to use renewable raw materials
- An adhesive for tiles
Our algorithms have been able to untangle a series of ambitious development projects, reconciling conflicting multidimensional requirements where the human mind had reached a deadlock.
Tim Welters, Head of Lab Innovation Services, Modeling, Digital Twins & Data Analytics, Adhesive Technologies at Henkel
When developing innovations or new methods, the advanced data analytics team is joining forces with universities and research institutes to come up with novel directions. Cooperating with leading cloud computing, data analysis, and artificial intelligence (AI) suppliers keeps them up to date in this fast-moving field.
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