A piece of apparatus for measuring the peel adhesion behavior of press
ure-sensitive adhesive tapes was developed. The apparatus allows peel
rates to be varied as any functions of time or peel distance. In a cyc
le run of the accelerating and decelerating peel processes, nonstation
ary peeling was investigated over a wide range of peel rates using rel
atively short-length samples. The resultant behavior in nonstationary
peeling indicated that in the interfacial failure regime, a good agree
ment with the normal stationary peeling can be obtained. This nonstati
onary peeling apparatus is expected to be useful for evaluation of pee
l adhesion. (C) 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.