Adhesive Failure and Deformation Behaviour of Polymers

Abstract

An instrument has been developed to determine the adhesive fracture energy as a function of the most important parameters such as temperature, contact time etc. and to study the stress–strain behaviour during bond separation. Additionally, the deformation processes during debonding were observed by high speed photography. Investigations of two high molecular weight polymers, polyisobutylene (PIB) and polyethylhexylacrylate (PEHA), showed two different types of bond separation: “brittle” behaviour with low adhesive failure energy for PIB and the formation and deformation of fibrillar structures for PEHA leading to much higher strains at break and adhesive failure energies. It follows from mechanical measurements that both polymers differ mainly by their entanglement networks. The much longer entanglement spacing for PEHA leads to the formation of fibrillar structures which, in accordance with a theory of Good, seem to be the reason for strong adhesion.