Dynamics of the peel front and the nature of acoustic emission during peeling of an adhesive tape

Abstract

We investigate the peel front dynamics and acoustic emission (AE) of an adhesive tape within the context of a recent model by including an additional dissipative energy that mimics bursts of acoustic signals.We find that the nature of the peeling front can vary from a smooth to a stuck-peeled configuration depending on the values of dissipation coefficient, inertia of the roller, and mass of the tape. Interestingly, we find that the distribution of AE bursts shows power law statistics with two scaling regimes with increasing pull velocity as observed in experiments. In these regimes, the stuck-peeled configuration is similar to the "edge of peeling" reminiscent of a system driven to a critical state.