Letter abstract
Nature Materials 4, 293 - 297 (2005)
doi:10.1038/nmat1342
Subject Categories: Surface and thin films | Computation, modelling and theory
Nested self-similar wrinkling patterns in skins
Kirill Efimenko1, Mindaugas Rackaitis2,4, Evangelos Manias2, Ashkan Vaziri3, L. Mahadevan3 and Jan Genzer1
Stiff thin films on soft substrates are both ancient and commonplace in nature; for instance, animal skin comprises a stiff epidermis attached to a soft dermis. Although more recent and rare, artificial skins are increasingly used in a broad range of applications, including flexible electronics1, tunable diffraction gratings2, 3, force spectroscopy in cells4, modern metrology methods5, and other devices6, 7, 8. Here we show that model elastomeric artificial skins wrinkle in a hierarchical pattern consisting of self-similar buckles extending over five orders of magnitude in length scale, ranging from a few nanometres to a few millimetres. We provide a mechanism for the formation of this hierarchical wrinkling pattern, and quantify our experimental findings with both computations and a simple scaling theory. This allows us to harness the substrates for applications. In particular, we show how to use the multigeneration-wrinkled substrate for separating particles based on their size, while simultaneously forming linear chains of monodisperse particles.
- Department of Chemical Engineering, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina 27695-7905, USA
- Department of Materials Science & Engineering, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802, USA
- Division of Engineering & Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA
- Present address: Bridgestone/Firestone Research, Akron, Ohio 44317, USA
Correspondence to: L. Mahadevan3 e-mail: lm@deas.harvard.edu
Correspondence to: Jan Genzer1 e-mail: Jan_Genzer@ncsu.edu
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