An experimental method for the determination of metal–polymer adhesion

• The standard method is affected by coating shearing and failure.
• Our method eliminates coating failure due to shearing and pull-off pin compression.
• The proposed method decreases experimental errors comparing to the standard method.

A method is proposed in order to reduce significantly the influence of the coating shear stress and its cohesion failure on the normal adhesion stress of metallic films on polymers. Most methods used so far were not able to avoid the interference of the cohesion failure when the interface was delaminated in order to measure the adhesion strength. Our method has been proved to work and the results are more accurate than the standard pull-off method. The experiments consisted in delaminating copper films deposited by physical vapor deposition on four different kinds of polymeric substrates: polypropylene, polyamide 6, high impact polystyrene and polyethylene terephthalate. The polymer surfaces have also been modified by means of substrate sanding and flaming processes. Optical and scanning electron microscopies were used to study the morphology of both the removed copper film and the polymer surface after pulling-off. Adhesion work was measured by contact angle to determine the necessary energy to pull-off the metal–polymer interface.