A new design for high-throughput peel tests: statistical analysis and example

The peel test is one of the most common techniques to investigate the properties of pressure sensitive adhesives (PSAs). As the demand increases for combinatorial tools to rapidly test material performance, designing a high-throughput peel test is a critical improvement of this well-established technique. A glaring drawback to adapting conventional peel tests to study combinatorial specimens is the lack of sufficient statistical information that is the foundation of this type of measurement. For example, using a continuous gradient of sample properties or test conditions in the peel direction implies that each data point (force) corresponds to a given test condition, thus prohibiting the average force to be calculated for a given condition. The aim of this paper is both to highlight the potential problems and limitations of a high-throughput peel test and suggest simple experimental solutions to these problems based on a statistical analysis of the data. The effect of the peel rate on the peel force is used to illustrate our approach.