Secondary bonding

An adhesive designed to carry significant service loads as part of an engineered joint, transferring stress between substrates over the whole bonded area rather than at discrete fasteners. Epoxies, polyurethanes and methacrylates are the main chemistries, used in applications from aircraft assemblies to wind turbine blade bonding.

A joining method in which an uncured laminate is cured directly against a previously cured component, usually with an adhesive layer at the interface. It sits between co-curing and secondary bonding, and surface preparation of the cured element is critical to joint quality.

The curing of two or more elements, such as skins and stiffeners, in a single cure cycle so that they bond together as the resin cures, without a separate adhesive joint. It removes secondary assembly steps but demands careful tooling to control the geometry of all elements at once.

A sacrificial woven fabric laminated onto the surface of a laminate and torn off after cure, leaving a clean, uniformly textured surface ready for bonding or painting. Release-coated variants can transfer contamination and are generally avoided where structural bonding will follow.