Adherence Kinetics of a PDMS Gripper with Inherent Surface Tackiness

Damage and fiber misalignment of woven fabrics during discontinuous polymer processing remain challenging. To overcome these obstacles, a promising switchable elastomeric adherence gripper is introduced here. The inherent surface tackiness is utilized for picking and placing large sheets. Due to the elastomer’s viscoelastic material behavior, the surface properties depend on loading speed and temperature. Different peeling speeds result in different adherence strength of an interface between the gripper and the substrate. This feature was studied in a carefully designed experimental test set-up including dynamic thermomechanical, as well as dynamic mechanical compression analyses, and adherence tests. Special emphases were given to the analyses of the applicability as well as the limitation of the viscoelastic gripper and the empirically modeling of the gripper’s pulling speed-dependent adherence characteristic. Two formulations of poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) with different hardnesses were prepared and analyzed in terms of their applicability as gripper. The main insights of the analyses are that the frequency dependency of the loss factor tanδ is of particular importance for the application along with the inherent surface tackiness and the low sensitivity of the storage modulus to pulling speed variations. The PDMS-soft material formulation exhibits the ideal material behavior for an adhesive gripper. Its tanδ varies within the application relevant loading speeds between 0.1 and 0.55; while the PDMS-hard formulation reveals a narrower tanδ range between 0.09 and 0.19. Furthermore, an empirical model of the pulling speed-dependent strain energy release rate G(v) was derived based on the experimental data of the viscoelastic characterizations and the probe tack tests. The proposed model can be utilized to predict the maximum mass (weight-force) of an object that can be lifted by the gripper