Many engineering and practical applications involve a thin layer of soft adhesive sandwiched between two rigid and flexible plates.

Question arises how much load is required to separate these two adherents.

Here we will consider the simple situation in which a thin flexible plate is lifted off a thin layer of adhesive which remains bonded to a rigid substrate. The lifting load is applied at the hanging end of the plate because of which the contact line between the plate and the film moves away from or towards the point of application of the load till equilibrium of forces is established. The adhesive layer is assumed to be incompressible and elastic without any viscous effect.