Viscoelastic Properties of a Zinc Oxide-Filled Acrylate Pressure Sensitive Adhesive

Viscoelastic window (VW) is an applied concept in formulation optimization for pressure-sensitive adhesives (PSAs) in order to reduce development time and costs. This report describes an investigation aimed to develop an acrylate-based PSA filled with zinc oxide (ZnO) nanoparticles (0-40 phr) for biomedical applications simply by tracing the evident changes in the viscoelastic properties as a function of formulation parameters using VW concept as a guideline. According to the results, for all adhesive formulations, the viscous term is dominated to elastic one. Incorporating ZnO particles until 20 phr, leads to increasing in storage modulus and more adaption of VW to the desired section, i.e. removable PSAs. Higher filler content does not follow the trend due to the agglomeration and poor dispersion of the filler.