Hot plate welding
thermal welding technique for joining thermoplastics
Hot plate welding, also called heated tool welding, is a thermal welding technique for joining thermoplastics. A heated tool is placed against or near the two surfaces to be joined in order to melt them. Then, the heat source is removed, and the surfaces are brought together under pressure. Hot plate welding has relatively long cycle times, ranging from 10 seconds to minutes, compared to vibration or ultrasonic welding. However, its simplicity and ability to produce strong joints in almost all thermoplastics make it widely used in mass production and for large structures, like large-diameter plastic pipes. Different inspection techniques are implemented in order to identify various discontinuities or cracks.
History
Hot plate welding was first used in the early 1930s for joining PVC.
It gained in popularity with the prevalence of polyolefins, which are difficult to adhesively bond.
By the 1960s, it was among the most widely used plastic welding methods.
Hot plate welding was used for pipelines and appliances as well as injection moldings. Numerous national and international associations for welding have specifications and guidelines for hot plate welding, including the Deutscher Verband fuer Schweissen (DVS) in Germany, the American Welding Society (AWS) in the United States, and the Comité Européen de Normalisation (CEN) in Europe.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hot plate welding” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.