Correlation between the sensorial perception and the descriptive instrumental analysis of the tackiness of silicone elastomers

Abstract

One of the objectives of sensorial metrology devices aims to substitute or to reproduce the operating of human organs with a high accuracy. The advantage of such a device is to get rid of the subjective nature of human perceptions. Thus, a probe tack test device has been developed in order to reproduce human tactile exploration, especially the perception of tackiness (or stickiness). Such a device enables, indeed, to study and to quantify mechanically the tackiness of silicone elastomers. However, tackiness can also be considered with a qualitative approach by a touch test. The resulting sensorial analysis requires the achievement of tactile experiments. The descriptive instrumental analysis and the sensorial analysis enable to establish a correlation on the phenomena of adhesion between two different ways of studying tackiness. This report shows that the sensorial perception of tackiness is not necessarily related to the "tack" force but also depends on other characteristics of tackiness, such as the energy of adhesion or the "tack" distance, which represent respectively the energy required to separate the punch from the sample and the distance between the moment when the force is negative and the moment when the probe is completely separated from the sample. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.