Abstract
It is known from applications that the mechanical behaviour of polymer bonds does not only depend on the properties of the polymer itself but also on the substrate. Therefore, the mechanical behaviour, i.e. the stiffness, of a polymer joint becomes thickness dependent. In the present work we describe experiments performed on polymer joints and we develop a continuum-based model which is able to describe the experimentally observed size effects without suggesting the microstructure in detail. The continuum mechanical model is enhanced by a scalar-valued structure parameter which describes all the effects taking place in the boundary layer which arises near the substrate. It is shown that the model parameters can be determined on the basis of simple shear experiments performed on polymer layers of different thickness.
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