A Practical Criterion for Rheological Modeling of the Peeling of Pressure Sensitive Adhesives

The transient extensional viscosity of non-crosslinked pressure sensitive adhesives (PSA's) and physically-crosslinked PSA's is measured and compared with theoretical predictions based on the linear viscoelastic (LVE) properties of the PSA's and the use of linear and quasi-linear constitutive equations. Based on a previously-derived expression for the relative contributions of individual relaxation modes of a polymeric material to its transient extensional viscosity, a criterion for whether large extensional deformations can be modeled on the basis of the LVE spectrum is proposed and evaluated for each PSA. The relevance to adhesion is demonstrated in peel tests, where the deformation of adhesive is quantified in images of the peel front under the assumption of uniaxial elongation and used to obtain theoretical peel forces in excellent agreement with measurements. This demonstrates the applicability of the criterion to the peeling process.