Adhesion of Rubber to Rigid Substrates: Memory Effects and the Threshold Energy

Abstract

Adhesion between rubber and more rigid materials is of importance for tyres and many other rubber articles. Although there have been notable advances in recent years, the mechanics of adhesion failure is still far from fully understood. Practical systems are often difficult to study in this respect because of complications such as uncertainty about the locus of failure. In the present studies a system in which vulcanized rubber is simply placed in contact with a rigid substrate (glass or coated glass) is being used as a model. This gives essentially interfacial failure. An energetics approach has proved very helpful in the study of various cohesive failure properties of rubber [1], In earlier work with the present adhesion system it was shown, through peel tests at various angles, that an energetics approach could be used to describe the peel behaviour with the results being independent of peel angle provided this was 30° or more. At lower angles the peel energy was found to increase with decrease in angle. This was attributed to energy losses due to elastic instability in the peel front zone arising from extension of the peeled leg and sometimes giving rise to the occurrence of waves of detachment and reattachment [2,3].