Students Experience Real World Application of Chemistry in Intensive

Students were engaged during the overview presentation of the company’s history, processing machinery, products, and applications given by Ken Keuchel, the President and CEO of Spunfab. They learned about the basics of hot-melt polymeric adhesives, thermal lamination processes, adhesion theory and more. They were also introduced to laboratory thermal analysis methods such as DSC (Differential Scanning Calorimetry) and TMA (Thermo Mechanical Analysis). Students then broke into small groups and performed material preparation for DSC experiments.

After lunch, the groups presented lab results from experiments done at Hawken the day before in which they evaluated four different Spunfab adhesives bonding five different substrates. Several of the applications the students tested were real commercial applications launched at Spunfab. Finally, students had a tour of the plant in action, where they observed how the products are formed, quality control checks are performed, and products packaged and shipped.