Pattern Formation in Tape-Peeling Traces of Deformed Adhesives

We can find fractal patterns in the peel traces of adhesive tapes. These tape-peeling patterns resemble the patterns obtained from a certain class of reaction-diffusion equations, and it is expected that the tape-peeling dynamics can also be modeled by a reaction-diffusion equation. Several models have been proposed previously for tape-peeling patterns, but these models contradict Newton’s law of action and reaction. To address this problem, we have recently proposed a new reaction-diffusion model for the tape-peeling pattern formation based on Newton’s equation of motion for the peel front. Although the physical mechanism described by our proposed model differs from that of the previous models, both can reproduce the experimental results. In this paper, we compare our new model with one of the previous models and discuss their relationship and differences.