A relationship between effective work of adhesion and peel force for thin hyperelastic films undergoing large deformation

A method to determine the effective work of adhesion for hyperelastic thin films undergoing large deformations is presented. Starting from energy balance equation a relationship between work of adhesion, the peel force, the peel angle, and the stretch is derived. Based on this relation a procedure to compute the energy of adhesion from peel tests is proposed. To this end the peel force as well as the engineering stress vs. engineering strain diagram for thin film is required. The derived relationship shows that the non-linearity of the stress-stain relation must be taken into account in computing the effective work of adhesion from the peel force. The processing of experimental data within the standard linear elasticity approach would lead to an overestimation of effective work of adhesion. The error would increase with a decrease of the peel angle. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.