Adhesive fasteners are generally referred as traditional methods integrated for joining parts, such as screws, nuts, bolts, rivets, welds and other mechanical fasteners. Some of the main features that also serves as the main advantages of these adhesives include reduced material, labor and processing costs; reduced assembly labor time; ease of use; and easier disassembly of parts, if necessary. They are used to bond metal parts, thus allowing the manufacturer to bond dissimilar materials such as even thermoplastics or composites. Besides, it can also fill the need for customers demands for strong-yet-flexible bonds, that also includes bonding flexible plastic to a thin metal.

The newest technology in the adhesive manufacturing industry is the elastic technique that complements traditional fastening methods to join two materials with a permanent layer of elastic adhesive in order to provide them high peel strength, impact resistance, and flexibility. Today, there has been an upheaval in the use of this technology and is being largely implemented in various industries like domestic appliances, and road and rail vehicles.

The reason behind the rise in the switch from the traditional adhesive replacing fasteners to the elastic fastening method is due to the attributes of the latter. In the case of elastic adhesive, for instance when an applied force peels or pries apart plastic adhesive-joint faces, the stresses involved quickly reach critical levels. Therefore, applied load is not distributed over the whole bond face, but is concentrated only along a narrow line at the joint edge. The material's ultimate breaking stress is rapidly exceeded and the bond tears or fails. Besides, the thick layered elastic-bonded joints also give under peeling forces and distribute the load over a wider area. This helps in lowering the stresses within the bonded materials and ensures that high tear propagation strength of elastomer, even where the adhesive layer has started to tear, and prevents sudden and catastrophic joint failure. This technology also gives the advantage of repairing the adhesive joins before the total failure.

These elastic adhesive fasteners also play the role of sealants by preventing entry of foreign particles like water, salt and other corrosive materials. This is possible due to the dynamic forces that are applied to the elastic adhesive layers.

Contrary to the rigid adhesive joints, the elastic layers have the ability to deform under applied loads and this property of it is instrumental in damping vibrations or displacing an external force. These elastic adhesives are well suited to join materials with different coefficients of linear expansion and may result in differential thermal expansion, causing adhesive-bonded components to move relative to one another. Elastic adhesives have a lower temperature resistance at around 100 to 50 degree centigrade are also said to be rigid with stable mechanical properties. Having an adhesive bonding joint strength of 2MPa, the relative displacement of bonded components before the joint fails exceeds 200% of the applied adhesive thickness, while the shear modulus is 1 to 3 MPa. These values rank elastic adhesives among adhesive sealants and hard-setting adhesives, thus making them the best in the adhesive replacing mechanical fastener industry.