You have used it millions of times in your daily life, because of it you have been able to keep not only your food fresh and maintain a longer shelf life, but maintain your family safety. What is it, pressure sensitive tape!



Pressure Sensitive (PS) or pressure sensitive adhesive (PSA) tape is used in the home, office, industry, and institutions for a wide variety of purposes and occasionally applied to various printed products to allow part or all of a document to be attached to another document, folder, carton, package, plastic container, or a variety of objects. Pressure sensitive adhesives are designed for either permanent or removable applications. Examples of permanent applications include safety labels for power equipment, foil tape for HVAC duct work, automotive interior trim assembly, and sound/vibration damping films. Some high performance permanent PSAs exhibit high adhesion values and can support kilograms of weight per square centimeter of contact area, even at elevated temperature. Single sheets, multiple part business forms, labels, and mailers are among the printed products onto which pressure sensitive tape is often applied. Permanent PSAs may be initially removable (for example to recover mislabeled goods) and build adhesion to a permanent bond after several hours or days.

Pressure-sensitive tape'so-called because light pressure causes it to stick readily to most surfaces?typically consists of four component layers. Pressure sensitive tape will stick with application pressure without the need for solvent, heat, or water for activation.

Fundamentally, there are two types of pressure-sensitive adhesives used on the various assortments of tape - rubber-based and acrylic. Rubber-based adhesives were first patented in the United States; these rubber adhesives penetrate porous surfaces and after extended periods of time, become brittle, losing their adhesive quality.

There may be some limitations in the way that pressure sensitive tape is applied to printed products. Some examples include:

?PS tape cannot be applied perpendicular to the direction that the paper travels through a web press or collating machine. It may be possible for the manufacturer to apply the tape in a perpendicular direction with an offline process, but this may substantially increase the price of the product.

?It may not be possible to apply tape to the backside of a sheet that also has numbering on the front if the tape and numbering are applied in one operation while the document is being printed. The tape or the numbering could be applied offline, but this would increase the cost of the finished piece.

?Pressure sensitive tape cannot be applied diagonally.

Pressure sensitive tapes can be applied to the front or back of printed products. The adhesive side of the tape is applied to the document with the liner facing out. When the customer is ready to use the document, the liner material is removed from the tape to expose the adhesive, allowing the product to be attached to another object.

Consisting of a liner covering a double-sided adhesive, the pressure sensitive tape is wound into large rolls. Some types of printing equipment are able to dispense the tape from the roll so that it can be applied to the printed products as they are being printed. In addition, some collating machines are capable of applying the tape to multiple-part printed products as the various parts are being collated and attached by the equipment.