05 May, 2024
Congratulations to Alan Espinos Chavez for successfully defending his thesis and receiving his Master's degree.
Thesis: Advanced Adhesive Tape with Enhanced Strength, Toughness, and Damping Characteristics
Committee:
Abstract
In the automotive and medical industries, bonding solutions with good adhesion, ease of application, and fast bonding are required. One of the solutions available on the market that meets these requirements are pressure sensitive adhesive tapes. However, toughness appears to be a limitation, and innovation is needed to increase the mechanical performance of these systems. For medical applications, there are considerable restrictions on modifying the adhesive and carrier materials from the tape to adjust the toughness, as it might have an impact on the human skin. Therefore, in this thesis, we propose an advanced tape that won’t have any change on the adhesive or carrier material, but it will include tailored defects using a bio-compatible and safe material that will increase the toughness and strength of the bond. The improvement is attributed to the defect ratio and the size of the individual defects, reaching up to 23.52% and around 37.19% larger lap-shear strength and initiation failure strain compared to conventional tapes. As part of automotive applications, one of the most important characteristics are the characteristics of the tape when subjected to vibration; that is why we evaluated the effect of the advanced tape on a system response under free excitation in order to obtain the damping ratio which showed an improvement of 6.43% as compared to a conventional tape. Such enhancement is related to the fact that the defects can redistribute the stresses at the adhesive-substrate interface rather than localize the stresses at the adhesive-substrate interface as it happens with conventional tapes.