Sealing Taillights

Tailor-Made, Fully Automatic Taillight Gasket Foam Seals and Protects Against Moisture, Corrosion and Dust

Taillights are a functional design element that hugs the car’s contours and that gives each model a distinctive look. We offer efficient and flexible sealing and bonding solutions to meet your individual taillight requirements. Our two-component sealing foam is installed and compressed in the overall part construction of the vehicle light. This keeps moisture away from the light sources and avoids the risk of lighting electronics corroding.

The taillight gasket foam used to seal 3-dimensional taillights must follow these contours so that the plastic parts are sealed against both the outside environment and auto body. However, conventional gaskets made of punched sponge rubber sheets commonly used for sealing 2-dimensional components are not effective.

In addition, the punching waste from this process is costly and not sustainable. However, our thixotropic 2-component polyurethane foam FERMAPOR K31 taillight gasket sealants can be applied precisely, and thus eliminates unnecessary waste.

Material

Sealing Solutions for Taillights

Developed to Meet Your Specific Requirements

Our dosing machines apply the Sonderhoff FERMAPOR K31 taillight sealing foams to the 3-dimensional contour of the lighting housing in a fully automatic and high-precision FIPFG (Formed-in-Place Gasketing) process. This creates a seamless gasket with an almost invisible coupling point of the foam gasket. Thanks to its high viscosity, the paste-like foam remains stable even on sloping contours. FERMAPOR K31 gaskets are ideally suited for practically all taillight designs.

Repeated removal and installation of taillights for repair and maintenance purposes is possible without weakening the seal, thanks to the very high resilience of the foam gasket and its excellent long-term behavior. To compensate for component tolerances, the polyurethane foam can be easily compressed during assembly thanks to a mixed-cell foam structure with low installation forces. Furthermore, our formulations can be modified to meet your specific requirements.

The different reaction phases of the sealing foam in the chronological sequence

Reference Material

	FERMAPOR K31-A-5555-1 FERMAPOR K31-B-4	FERMAPOR CC-A-5530-2-B FERMAPOR CC-B-66
Mixing ratio	4 : 1	2.3 : 1
Pot life	35 sec.	30 sec.
Tack-free time	4 min.	16 min.
Viscosity A component	55,000 mPas	70,000 mPas
Foam density	0.27 g/cm3	0.31 g/cm3
Hardness (Shore 00)	54	55
Temperature resistance	from -40 to +80 °C	from -40 to +80 °C
Pretreatment	Primer P23 (solvent-based) P13(water-based) or plasma	Primer P23 (solvent-based) P13(water-based) or plasma

In addition to the reference products, we develop material systems according to your individual requirements. Influencing factors include pot life until start of foaming, curing time, and the viscosity, hardness, and adhesion properties.

Caption language

Repeatedly Opening and Reclosing for Maintenance Purposes with Remaining Sealing Effect

The high resilience of the foam seal allows the components to be opened and reclosed repeatedly for maintenance purposes without the tightness deteriorating. After installation, the rear light is sealed, and the sensitive electronics are protected against splashing water and the effects of the weather.

Watch a video showing the foam compression process.

Cross-section of a polyurethane foam bead in the groove without compression.

Compressing the foam gasket between approximately 30 - 60 % of the original height achieves the required degree of tightness in the installed condition.

Process

DM 502 Mixing and Dosing System with 3-Axis Linear Robot and a Shuttle Table for Picking Up Parts of the Taillight Housing

The reference configuration shown here for sealing the housings of taillights consists of our DM 502 mixing and dosing system with the LR-HD 3-axis linear robot as well as a WT 1-LEVEL shuttle table for picking up parts. The two pick-up plates working in pendulum mode enable the workpieces fixed there to be picked up and processed in one plane. This makes it possible to guarantee continuous operation.

The placement and holding on the shuttle table of the taillight housing to be sealed is performed either by a machine operator, who can also check the parts for quality, or by a Pick & Place Robot. In this case, an optionally installed camera system could carry out the quality control of the parts.

Flexible and Fully Automatic – According to Your Requirements

For sealing the taillight housing, FERMAPOR K31 thixotropic polyurethane sealing foam is applied via the CNC-controlled MK 825 mixing head, in a high-precision and fully automatic process, onto the 2D or 3D application surface or into the groove of the component contour. After the dosing cycle, the coupling point of the foam gasket closes almost seamlessly and is thus virtually invisible. Due to the uniform compression in the installed state, a high level of tightness is achieved over the entire contour of the taillight.

For improved adhesion of the foam gasket to plastics such as PP or PE using plasma, we install an optional plasma application unit on the rear of the CNC Y-axis in addition to the mixing head.

Even with short cycle times and high unit numbers, the material application process using the FIPFG method is carried out with high dosing precision and repeat accuracy. As a result, you achieve foam gaskets of uniformly high quality. This means that your sealed taillights can be processed rapidly, right through to final assembly. This saves time and money.

In addition, our fail-safe mixing and dosing system can be operated easily and intuitively without the need for extensive training. Due to the automatic logging of dosing program data, all process data can be traced and evaluated by the machine operator while production is running.

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