Enhancement of adhesion strength through microvibrations: Modeling and experiments

High-frequency micrometrical vibrations have been shown to greatly influence the adhesive performance of soft interfaces, however a detailed comparison between theoretical predictions and experimental results is still missing. Here, the problem of a rigid spherical indenter, hung on a soft spring, that is unloaded from an adhesive viscoelastic vibrating substrate is considered. The experimental tests were performed by unloading a borosilicate glass lens from a soft PDMS substrate excited by high-frequency micrometrical vibrations. We show that as soon as the vibration starts, the contact area increases abruptly and during unloading it decreases following approximately the JKR classical model, but with a much increased work of adhesion with respect to its thermodynamic value. We find that the pull-off force increases with the amplitude of vibration up to a certain saturation level, which appeared to be frequency dependent. Under the hypothesis of short range adhesion, a lumped mechanical model was derived, which, starting from an independent characterization of the rate-dependent interfacial adhesion, predicted qualitatively and quantitatively the experimental results, without the need of any adjustable parameters.

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600: Technology

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https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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Enhancement-of-adhesion-strength-through-micr_2025_Journal-of-the-Mechanics-.pdf

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Enhancement of adhesion strength through microvibrations: Modeling and experiments