You may have wondered many times as to why a sheet of wallpaper refuses to tear neatly from your wall despite taking all precautions and you end up paying to decorate your walls again. An international team of researchers probably has the answers to your problem.
The Centre National de la Reserche Scientifique(CNRS), Paris, the Universidad de Santiago, Chile and the MIT together worked on the problem and said that the phenomenon of "The Wallpaper Problem" is actually based on the laws of physics. The researchers said that the pattern where the two cracks propagate towards each other to meet at a point is extremely robust, and it applies not only to the wallpaper,but also to other adhesives like the tape.
According to them, the ubiquitous triangular tears arise from interactions between three inherent properties of adhesive materials-elasticity(stiffness), adhesive energy (how strongly the adhesive sticks to a surface) and fracture energy(how tough it is to rip). Based on these three properties, the research team developed a formulation that predicts the angle of the triangle formed. They said that as the strip is pulled, energy builed up in the fold that forms where the tape is peeling from the surface. The tape can realease th energy in two ways:
1. By unpeeling from its surface and
2. By becoming narrower, both of which it does.
The Centre National de la Reserche Scientifique(CNRS), Paris, the Universidad de Santiago, Chile and the MIT together worked on the problem and said that the phenomenon of "The Wallpaper Problem" is actually based on the laws of physics. The researchers said that the pattern where the two cracks propagate towards each other to meet at a point is extremely robust, and it applies not only to the wallpaper,but also to other adhesives like the tape.
According to them, the ubiquitous triangular tears arise from interactions between three inherent properties of adhesive materials-elasticity(stiffness), adhesive energy (how strongly the adhesive sticks to a surface) and fracture energy(how tough it is to rip). Based on these three properties, the research team developed a formulation that predicts the angle of the triangle formed. They said that as the strip is pulled, energy builed up in the fold that forms where the tape is peeling from the surface. The tape can realease th energy in two ways:
1. By unpeeling from its surface and
2. By becoming narrower, both of which it does.
No comments:
Post a Comment