ABSTRACT
In the spirit of Prof. Gordon’s remarks, we proceed in this chapter to investigate several applications of adhesion testing that are both informative and potentially useful. Among the plethora of adhesion tests that can be performed, a small subset tends to dominate in terms of actual implementation in practice. The most popular tests share the common properties that they are relatively easy to implement and give semiquantitative data that is relevant to a particular practical application. For flexible coatings, the peel test has to head the popularity poll in terms of number of publications in the literature and the number of different variations and applications reported. For hard brittle coatings, the prize goes to the scratch test for roughly the same reasons. We allow the pull test onto the chart because it can be applied to both flexible and brittle coatings, although in terms of overall popularity it ranks at number 3. In what follows, detailed examples of each of these tests are covered to give a more in-depth view of real-life adhesion testing, what the goals are, how the tests are implemented, and what results are achieved.
