Y-peel characterization of adhesively-bonded carton board: an objective method

Abstract

Carton board packages are often closed with an adhesive. The adhesive joint thus formed has to meet the demands during the entire product life from converting to end-use. The adhesive joint has to be characterized if it is good or bad for the actual application. Today such characterization is done by manually peeling the joint, immediately after the adhesive application in the gluing machine. The manual peel test is a subjective test that is operator dependent. An operator needs long experience to be able to perform a manual peel test. Therefore, the packaging industry is interested in a test method that can objectively predict good or bad adhesive joints. The adhesive joints have been tested in the so-called Y-peel test arrangement. An advantage of the Y-peel test is that it gives an objective result from the force-elongation curve. Testing has been performed with carton boards of two different thicknesses. Hotmelt adhesive was used and the open time was varied in the glue applicator. It was found that the Y-peel test gives results in qualitative agreement with the manual peel test. Moreover, by evaluating the energy consumption (dissipative energy) during the Y-peel test it was possible to obtain not only a qualitative but also a quantitative assessment of the adhesive joint.

Influence of Surface Treatments on the Mechanical Strength of Hotmelt Adhesive Joints Made of Cartonboards

“…The predominant failure modes were interfacial failure between the cartonboard and the adhesive, and fibre tear. Notably, the appearance of interfacial fracture in this work was much more frequent than in previous studies, see, e.g., [14].…”

“…1) from ZR Sverige (Gothenburg, Sweden). The Y-peel tests were made with a tearing speed of 10 mm/min at 50% RH and 23 • C, for more details see Tryding et al [6] and Korin and coworkers [1,14]. Some of the failures were subsequently examined using Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM).…”

“…Here W d is used to quantify the dissipative energy associated with fracture of the adhesive joint, while the maximal normal force is the maximal force acting across adhesive joint during the Y-peel test. For a detailed description of these concepts see [14]. Also, the number of specimens tested in every set-up was five.…”

“…The adhesive joint here is defined as the complete system of two pieces of cartonboard with HMA in between [14]. The joints were made by applying the HMA on one sheet of cartonboard (Part1) and then mounting the other cartonboard sheet (Part2) on top of the HMA under pressure.…”

Finite Element Analysis of Hot Melt Adhesive Joints in Carton Board

“…Also shown in Figure 5 is the stiffness of the Y-peel specimen taking only in-plane deformations into account. 3 This analysis is based on the composite elastic modulus of the carton board laminate using the elastic moduli in MD given in Table 1. It is evident that out-of-plane deformation adjacent to the adhesive joint contributes tremendously to the overall behaviour of the Y-peel assembly.…”