Rubber Adhesives

Cray Valley has developed a portfolio of products for the tire industry. Ricon® liquid polybutadiene resins are established as performance-enhancing additives for tire tread compounds requiring specific recipes for different segments — winter, summer, all-season, racing, and specialty. Our Ricon resins including silylated resins modify the viscoelastic properties of these compounds to optimize the balance of traction, fuel economy, and durability.

Cray Valley is a trusted provider of Ricon® and Krasol® functional resins, which manage adhesion and dynamic properties for belt, hose, seal, wire and cable, and other industrial rubber applications. Our specialty additives deliver high modulus, hardness, and abrasion resistance to help belts retain their original properties over millions of revolutions. They enhance strong, lightweight hoses with excellent thermal, corrosion, and chemical resistance. They impart rubber adhesion to metals and reinforcing textiles.

Adhesion Promoters

Cray Valley offers a wide range of products to enhance adhesion in your performance applications.

Our well-known Cleartack pure monomer resins provide styrenic end block reinforcement in SBC adhesive formulations, while imparting low color and strong tack to hot melt adhesives.

Ricon and Krasol can improve adhesion with polymer substrates such as polyolefins.

In addition to that, our specialty Ricon MA product range (based on maleic anhydride modified liquid polybutadiene) can improve adhesion with a wide variety of metal substrates and textiles such as steel, aluminum, copper, polyamide, and nylon textile. These technical advantages are employed in automotive structural adhesives, sealants, rubber adhesion, belts and hoses.

We also offer C4 resins with a variety of functionality, including hydroxyl-terminated, and maleinized polymers. These resins offer great formulating latitude in reactive adhesives.

Electronics

Our Krasol hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene resins offer unique properties in potting and encapsulation formulations. Cured as urethanes, these resins impart good thermal resistance, excellent hydrolytic stability, and low moisture permeation. Krasol formulations show consistent elongation and embedment stress at a wide range of temperatures. High transparency enables these grades to be applied to optical applications such as touch panels and digital displays.

Ricon resins can be used in copper clad laminate (CCL) applications to improve electrical properties. When used in methacrylated PPE formulations, Ricon copolymers can replace some or all of the TAIC hardener. The Ricon resins will improve toughness while improving the dielectric properties of the formulation. Ricon copolymers have the appropriate balance of backbone chemistry and processable viscosity needed to meet the increasing demands of this industry.

Adhesives for Solar Panels and Wind Turbines

Cray Valley’s hydrogenated and non-hydrogenated resins such as Krasol can be used for solar panel backsheets to improve water resistance and protection of the solar cells from moisture and degradation, extending thus extending the global shelf life and efficiency of solar panels.

Ricon and Ricon MA can be used as additives in windmill blades to improve the glass or carbon fiber reinforcement of the blade structure and react efficiently in different types of matrices such as epoxy resins and vinyl esters. Our products will improve the toughness and flexibility of the windmill blades.

Thermoplastic Elastomers

Cray Valley products provide important advantages for thermoplastic elastomer (TPE) applications. Ricon, Krasol, and Cleartack resins enhance the processability, mechanical, and adhesion properties for TPE and vulcanizates used in emerging automotive, fluid handling, construction, consumer goods, and wire and cable industries.

Our C4 resins find utility in applications where high filler loading is required. The resins impart the low-temperature flexibility, moisture resistance, and acid/base resistance critical to these formulations.

Ricon, Krasol, and Cleartack are reactive plasticizers in specialty applications such as printing plates where formulators can dial in hardness, chemical resistance, and resiliency. Our resins also act as oxygen scavengers in packaging applications, protecting food, juices, and medications from degradation.

Our goal in specialty markets is to work with each customer to develop value-added products that provide solutions to their formulation challenges.