Peeling tape as a reaction-diffusion system

When the adhesive tape is peeled, two-type structures appear at the peeling front depending on how fast the tape is peeled. In particular, at a critical peeling speed, the two structures switch chaotic, and the peeled trace shows Sierpinski-gasket like fractal pattern [1].

There are attempts to construct a mathematical model to reproduce these dynamics, and a phase-field with asymmetric interactions using a ramp function model was proposed in [2-4]. While the model proposed in [2-4] can reproduce the quantitative dynamics, it doesn’t show Sierpinski-gasket like patterns.

In this work, we developed a new noiseless partial differential equation model based on a reaction-diffusion system which can describe this pattern formation.

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[1] Y. Yamazaki and A. Toda, J. Phys. Soc. Jpn. 71, 1618 (2002).

[2] Y. Yamazaki, Prog. Theor. Phys. 125, 641 (2011).

[3] Y. Yamazaki, J. Phys. Soc. Jpn. 86, 043001 (2017).

[4] Y. Yamazaki and A. Toda, Physica D 214, 120 (2006).