Peeling of an Extensible Soft Microbeam to Solid: Large Deformation Analysis

Adhesion and peeling of slender structures at micro and nanoscale have attracted great attention of scientists and engineers, which hold great implications in a number of domains. In this study, we present the model formulation on the peeling of a soft beam under a concentrated force, by considering its large deformation and axis extensibility. The governing equation group and the transversality condition are then derived, according to the variation on the energy functional with movable boundary conditions. We find that the key parameters in peeling, such as the adhered segment length, applied force and length increment of the beam, are correlated with two dimensionless variables, i.e., the non-dimensional maximum displacement of the beam and non-dimensional work of adhesion. The calculated results are in excellent agreement with the experimental data, which are also compared with the infinitesimal deformation model and large deformation model with inextensible axis. These findings shed light on the design of elementary structures in micro and nanodevices, fabrication of nanofiber materials, and better application of micro/nanoprinting technique, etc.