Time required for recovery from compression

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Ngineer
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Hello everybody,

As a university project, we are designing an electronic device in which the output depends on the current thickness of a thin polymer layer (typically around a few microns) which is subject to different levels of pressure and thus different levels of compression.

I am interested in understanding how to model the time it takes the polymer layer to recover to its original thickness, say the pressure instantaneously dropped to the original "zero" level.

Although I stand to be corrected, I believe a good place to start is Newton's second law (f=ma), and accounting for gravity based on device orientation at operation. Once a value for acceleration is found, the time required to reach a specific length can then be easily computed.

If this is a valid approach, which mass do I use in that formula? Is it the entire mass of the material that forms the layer?

Your help is greatly greatly appreciated!
 
Gravity and inertia in this type of situation are likely to be insignificant. The response of the polymer layer is likely to be dominated by the time-dependent viscoelastic behavior of the polymer. Google Viscoelasticity.
 
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