Millions of people world wide live with an ostomy, which is a surgically created outlet in the intestine created to treat e.g. colon cancer or Crohn's decease. To allow these people to live a relatively normal life, an ostomy bag is adhered to the skin to collect waste from the ostomy. The ostomy bag is attached to the skin using so-called skin adhesives, which must provide sufficient adhesion to ensure optimal device functionality, while being easy to remove without damaging the skin. The skin adhesive should also support the user while sweating, which means that it needs to provide sufficient adhesive properties in situations where sweat is released at the skin--adhesive interface.
Although, skin adhesives have been used for more than 50 years and the functionality and formulations of skin adhesives have been improved, users are still experiencing problems with leakage of waste, adhesive failure, and skin damage. To develop the next generation of skin adhesives, new knowledge is required about diffusion of bodily fluids in adhesives and adhesive performance during wear.
In this PhD project, a new impedance-based technique is developed for probing diffusion of artificial bodily liquids in skin adhesives. The technique is used for investigating how the material chemistry, composition and geometry influence the water absorption functionality of adhesives, which is expected to be important for improving skin health and adhesion during perspiration.
Next, a perspiration simulator is developed, where skin adhesion can be evaluated on a skin mimicking substrate during realistic perspiration conditions. The adhesion of carefully designed adhesives is systematically evaluated in different dry and perspiration situations where the link between the adhesive and water absorbing properties of the adhesives is mapped.
