Complex dynamics in the peeling of an adhesive tape

Fracture is a very complicated phenomenon and its dynamics is not well described up to now by a consistent physical and/or mathematical model. In this paper we synthetically present the main experimental and theoretical results for the peeling of an adhesive tape, i.e. a viscoelastic dissipative system, viewed as a two-dimensional fracture propagation. From recent peeling experiments, using a common adhesive tape, the emergence of hierarchical structures in a broad range of time scales was observed in a definite region of the stick-slip regime, and this is one the indicators commonly used speaking of complex systems. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.