ABSTRACT
This chapter contains a brief description of the more important terms and ideas involved in bonding. Applying adhesives to a metal-oxide surface is not necessarily bad. If the metal oxide is tightly bound to metal and is cohesively strong and chemically stable, then the resulting adhesive bond may be both strong and durable. An adhesive is simply material applied as a liquid, which allows the establishment of unlike charge attractions and then solidifies to provide the bond with significant internal strength. Increasing the flexibility of the adhesive is a common technique for resisting expansion-contraction failure. In general, flexible adhesives are better able to resist such stresses because they can shrink and stretch with the moving adherends. The advantage of surface conversion is simply that the surface is changed from a more or less unknown condition to one of fairly well understood composition and behavior. Thus, some assurance is gained that the adhesive is always being applied to uniform surface.
