Finite Width Effect of Thin Films Buckling on Compliant Substrate

Buckling of stiff thin films on compliant substrates has many important applications ranging from stretchable electronics to precision metrology and sensors.  John Hutchinson, Zhiggang Suo, Rui Huang, Xi Chen et al. have developed nice theories for stiff thin film buckling on soft substrate. However, many of these models assume plane-strain deformation, which do not agree with experimental observations for narrow thin films.  We  (Hanqing Jiang, Yonggang Huang et al.) developed an analytical model to incorporate the finite width effect of thin film buckling on compliant substrate. Our analysis shows that the buckling amplitude and wavelength increase with the film width. This analysis will be published in JMPS. A similiar paper by Tarasovs and Andersons that conducts finite element simulations to study the similar problem was published in IJSS recently.