A statistical method for the prediction of the loop tack and the peel of PSAs from probe test measurements

We investigated the potential of the probe test as a high throughput test for the rapid screening of a large number of candidate pressure-sensitive adhesives. The output of a successful screening tool should be usable to predict with some precision important characteristics of adhesives such as loop tack and peel which take longer to measure. The output of an instrumented probe tack test being both reproducible and sensitive to changes in polymer structure or formulation, we developed a statistical procedure which builds a polynomial model of the force values at the relevant time instants only, the number of necessary monomials being established using a test for lack of fit. The performance of the models is then estimated using cross-validation and an independent test set. The prediction results obtained on a data set representative of commercial adhesives show that the force signal recorded during a probe test indeed contains exploitable information about the loop tack and peel forces, and that the proposed statistical procedure is more successful for quantitative predictions than existing alternative approaches.