Unveiling the Role of Compositional Drifts on the Tack of Pressure-Sensitive-Adhesives

Project Description

Pressure-sensitive-adhesives (PSAs) find widespread use in electronic, automobile, packaging, and biomedical applications as they instantaneously adhere to various surfaces without undergoing chemical reactions. These materials are typically produced by copolymerizing hydrophilic and hydrophobic monomers in an organic solvent or water and crosslinking the resulting polymers with a coordination complex. Thus, PSAs are inherently inhomogeneous polymers, with chains that compositionally drift due to differences in comonomer reactivity and nanostructures that evolve because of chemical incompatibility and chain segregation. This project aims to understand the effect of these inhomogeneities on the nanostructure and adhesive properties of PSAs.

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