The case for choosing adhesives before design is done

Bringing Adhesives Earlier into Development

Vehicle development timelines have compressed sharply. A process that once stretched across three or four years is now routinely expected to fit into one or two - and in certain markets, considerably less. The pressure falls across the board: software, electronics, production planning, manufacturing strategy. But one area that rarely features in these conversations, despite having a material bearing on both performance and programme speed, is adhesives.

Battery development is where this tension is most visible. Engineering teams are now deeply reliant on digital modelling and virtual validation - crash simulations, thermal analysis, iterative design - all running long before a physical prototype is commissioned.

Adhesives, though, tend to get factored in late. The architecture is largely defined before anyone seriously engages with material selection, and when the chosen adhesive fails to satisfy the structural or thermal requirements of the final design, it means going back around the loop. It is an expensive place to discover a mismatch.

Henkel's response is LOCTITE SOLVE, a platform built around the proposition that adhesive selection shouldn't sit at the tail end of development. Tobias Knecht, Head of Global Market Strategy E-Mobility at Henkel, frames the underlying problem directly. In the past, engineers would first design a component and then identify a suitable material. Today, this sequential approach often results in additional loops and delays. In an environment where development speed is becoming a key competitive factor, this is increasingly problematic.

The platform is designed to bring material decisions forward into the virtual phase - so that adhesives are informing design rather than being retrofitted to it.

Why batteries in particular

Batteries are the natural starting point. They are the most complex assembly in an electric vehicle, with mechanical, thermal, electrical and safety demands all acting on the same structure simultaneously. Adhesives directly influence crash behaviour, thermal management and structural integrity, and misjudgements in material selection can propagate through all three.

Physical prototypes are expensive and slow to iterate, which is why the industry has invested so heavily in digital engineering. And the rationale is straightforward: every problem resolved in simulation is one that doesn't have to be caught on a test rig at considerably greater cost, and at a stage when changes are far harder to absorb.

Material data cards

The platform is built around material data cards - digital datasets that capture an adhesive's properties in a form that simulation environments can use directly. Engineers load these into their models and run comparisons across structural, thermal and mechanical performance criteria. The concept is not new; what has changed is the speed and economics of generating them.

Producing a reliable data card has traditionally been a lengthy undertaking. Olaf Lammerschop, Global Technology Lead E-Mobility at Henkel, describes the challenge plainly: creating a reliable data card typically requires extensive testing, with multiple temperatures, load cases and boundary conditions needing to be considered. Depending on the application, this process can take months. Henkel has addressed this directly with an AI model trained across tens of thousands of simulations, capable of generating an initial data card from a small number of input parameters.

According to Lammerschop, the accuracy is already above 80 percent, which is more than adequate in the early stages of development. It doesn't replace full validation, but it means engineers are no longer waiting on laboratory data before they can meaningfully engage with the design space - a shift in sequencing that has a measurable effect on programme rhythm.

Conceptual formulations

The more consequential capability lies a step further on. LOCTITE SOLVE can generate material data cards for formulations that have never been physically produced. Engineers define their target properties - strength, flexibility, thermal conductivity - and if nothing in Henkel's existing portfolio satisfies those requirements, the platform generates a conceptual material profile derived from Henkel's formulation knowledge. These profiles are not theoretical abstractions; they are bounded by what is actually manufacturable, which is precisely what makes them useful rather than merely interesting.

Tobias Knecht points out that this closes a long-standing gap in the development process. Previously, engineers either relied on suboptimal existing data or on assumptions that might not translate into real materials. The platform connects these two worlds more closely. The result is a development process in which material exploration and design iteration can run in parallel rather than in sequence.

Once a conceptual formulation has been validated in simulation, initial samples can be produced within a short timeframe, according to Lammerschop - ensuring that digital exploration leads to tangible outcomes rather than remaining confined to the model.

A different kind of supplier relationship

What LOCTITE SOLVE represents, at its core, is a repositioning of Henkel's role in the development chain. Engaging at the simulation stage rather than the procurement stage is a fundamentally different proposition - one that demands a different kind of trust and a different quality of conversation.

Knecht is explicit about the intention: the goal is to address larger customer challenges, not just to deliver products. Reducing development time is one of those challenges, and it cannot be solved by a supplier who arrives only after the critical decisions have been made.

Henkel's global network of Battery Engineering Centers reinforces this model. These facilities allow customers to move from virtual to physical validation within a single ecosystem - testing, application development and system-level validation without a change of partner mid-process. That continuity is not a commercial convenience; it is a technical necessity. Digital results that cannot be reliably reproduced in hardware have no practical value, and the risk of losing fidelity in the translation between virtual and physical stages is one that serious development programmes cannot afford.

The regional picture adds further texture. In China, collaboration between development partners tends to be direct and fast-moving, with shorter feedback loops and a pragmatism that accelerates decision-making. European and North American programmes are generally more structured, with defined stage gates and formal review cadences. The cultural and procedural differences are real, but the underlying pressure - to bring key suppliers in earlier and compress timelines without sacrificing rigour - is consistent across all three.

According to Knecht, faster development cycles require closer and earlier collaboration between all stakeholders, and the established model of siloed, sequential handoffs between design, materials and production is becoming less effective in the context of electrification.

Battery systems represent the most immediate application, but the principle extends wherever materials can be integrated earlier into digital workflows: automotive electronics, structural components, any assembly where late-stage material selection introduces avoidable risk. The adhesive remains a physical product. That has not changed. What has changed is where it enters the development conversation - and how much of the most consequential work can now be done before anyone opens a laboratory door.