Deformation of soft substrates during adhesive peel testing

Abstract Peeling of pressure‐sensitive adhesives from low modulus substrates such as human skin induces a significant out‐of‐plane deformation at the crack tip. In the context of medical adhesives, this deformation is related to the pain and injury caused to the skin and underlying tissue during removal. Here, a method is presented to measure the out‐of‐plane deformation of elastic substrates as a medical adhesive tape is removed from the surface, a necessary first step in the eventual quantification of pain. Elastic human skin analogs comprised of a simple bilayer with varied moduli across several orders of magnitude are fabricated. Next, a nonporous medical adhesive tape is peeled from these substrates and the deformation is quantified. A model derived from contact mechanics for a rectangular pressure is fit to the experimental data. By correcting for confinement effects and deformation within the adhesive, good agreement is found between the newly reported model in this study and the experimentally observed deformation.