Polymer coatings find use in a wide range of industrial applications, from conventional paints and coatings in building and construction to the pharmaceutical industry, organic solar cell production, and lithium battery technology. Despite their importance, there are gaps in our understanding of the drying process, the stress development during drying, and their influence on the final mechanical properties of the dried film. This perspective focuses on the fundamental aspects of the drying and film formation process, highlights the gaps, and suggests directions for future work.

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We study indentation by a rigid cylindrical punch of finite, free-standing, adhesive elastic layers that are supported only at their ends. The adhesion is considered through an adhesive-zone model. Formulating the boundary-value problem, we obtain two coupled Fredholm integral equations of the first kind, which are solved by a collocation method. Results for non-adhesive contact are obtained when adhesion is zero, and they match well with our own finite element computations and earlier approximate analyses. Additionally, we obtain new results for deeper indentation of non-adhesive contact. In the limit of very adhesive and/or very soft solids, we formulate an approximate model similar to the well-known Johnson–Kendall–Roberts (JKR) model for half-spaces. Our results for adhesive contact match well with preliminary indentation experiments on adhesive layers. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of our approach in modelling structural adhesives through a specific example.

In this article, we extended our approach, that is mentioned in part 1, to model the indentation of an adhesive beam by a rigid cylindrical punch. We considered clamped and simply supported beams for this study. We first modeled these beams as infinite length elastic layers which obey the kinetic and kinematic constraints imposed by the end supports. The adhesion effects are considered via the Dugdale-Barenblatt model based adhesive zone model. Solving the governing equations of this infinite layer along with its boundary conditions, we obtain a set of coupled Fredholm integral equations of first kind. These integral equations are then solved employing the collocation technique. The results obtained are then compared with finite element (FE) simulations and the previously published results for the nonadhesive case. We also obtained the results for the well-known Johnson-Kendall-Roberts (JKR) approximation of the contact. Finally we investigated the effect of various adhesive strengths on the contact parameters and showed the transition of the results from 'Hertzian' to 'JKR' approximation.