The effect of bond formation on the tack of polymers

The tack of polymers to be used as adhesives is measured by a two-stage process of bond formation and bond separation. Bond formation is governed by the contact time, the contact force, the roughness of the surfaces, surface and interfacial tensions, and the mechanical or viscoelastic properties of the adhesive and substrate. This paper presents experimental studies of the contact formation of various model polymers on steel surfaces with well-defined and different degrees of roughness. The tack was measured with an instrument of the probe tack type, which determines the adhesive (interfacial) fracture energy per unit of interface as a measure of the tack and by means of which the most important parameters during bond formation and separation, such as the contact time, contact force, rate of separation, and temperature, can be adjusted and measured over sufficiently wide ranges. In the typical rime interval for the contact time, the polymers are found in the plateau range of their viscoelastic spectrum. This means that entanglements strongly affect their bonding behaviour Good agreement was found between the experimental results presented in this study and a model of contact formation on rough surfaces, published recently by Creton and Leibler [1], especially concerning the dependence of the adhesive fracture energy on the contact force and the contact time for smooth and rough substrate surfaces. The influence of the surface roughness becomes significant at low contact forces, where full contact is not yet developed on a rough substrate surface, and for polymers with comparatively high moduli. The fracture energy increases with the contact time and shows the same time dependence as the reciprocal modulus.