Peel-to-Roll Transition in Sticky Blisters: Toward Hetereneous Adhesion from Homogeneous Interfaces

When adhesion fails in thin film-substrate systems, it gives rise to localized delamination zones known as blisters form. These features are observed in applications ranging from protective coatings and packaging to PCB circuits and laminated composites. More recently, blisters have attracted interest as programmable motifs for reconfigurable surface architectures. In this talk, we reveal a surprising mechanical transition that occurs when an adhesive blister is peeled from one of its attached ends.As the peel front advances and reaches a critical distance from the blister edge, it triggers spontaneous re-adhesion at the opposite boundary - initiating a peel-to-roll transition. This rolling process causes a sharp drop in adhesion force, which then plateaus and persists through the rolling phase. Remarkably, we observe this behavior across a broad range of commercial adhesives, including acrylic foam tapes, Scotch tape, and even Velcro. Using a controllable model system - a thin Mylar film adhered to a soft, elastic substrate - we characterize the contact geometry at onset of rolling. We find that an emergent dwell time, defined as the rolling contact length divided by the peel speed, governs the magnitude of the adhesion force jump. These results offer new design principles for engineering spatially heterogeneous adhesion in soft interfaces, using materially homogeneous systems.