English

How Geometry Controls the Tearing of Adhesive Thin Films on Curved Surfaces

Soft Condensed Matter 2011-10-17 v2 Materials Science Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems Pattern Formation and Solitons

Abstract

Flaps can be detached from a thin film glued on a solid substrate by tearing and peeling. For flat substrates, it has been shown that these flaps spontaneously narrow and collapse in pointy triangular shapes. Here we show that various shapes, triangular, elliptic, acuminate or spatulate, can be observed for the tears by adjusting the curvature of the substrate. From combined experiments and theoretical models, we show that the flap morphology is governed by simple geometric rules.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1106.5366,
  title  = {How Geometry Controls the Tearing of Adhesive Thin Films on Curved Surfaces},
  author = {Olga Kruglova and Fabian Brau and Didier Villers and Pascal Damman},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1106.5366},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

6 pages, 5 figures