Critical confinement and elastic instability in thin solid films

TL;DR

This paper investigates the elastic instability in thin soft films bonded to rigid supports, revealing how confinement influences fingering patterns and providing experimental methods to control this instability.

Contribution

It introduces a perturbation analysis of the instability and demonstrates how critical confinement triggers fingering patterns in thin elastic films.

Findings

Fingering wavelength depends only on film thickness.

Amplitude of patterns varies with material and geometric properties.

Critical confinement induces the instability.

Abstract

When a flexible plate is peeled off a thin and soft elastic film bonded to a rigid support, uniformly spaced fingering patterns develop along their line of contact. While, the wavelength of these patterns depends only on the thickness of the film, their amplitude varies with all material and geometric properties of the film and that of the adhering plate. Here we have analyzed this instability by the regular perturbation technique to obtain the excess deformations of the film over and above the base quantities. Furthermore, by calculating the excess energy of the system we have shown that these excess deformations, associated with the instability, occur for films which are critically confined. We have presented two different experiments for controlling the degree of confinement: by pre-stretching the film and by adjusting the contact width between the film and the plate.