Theoretical and Experimental Studies of Bending of Inorganic Electronic Materials on Plastic Substrates
In this paper, we report comprehensive experimental and theoretical
studies of bending in structures relevant to inorganic flexible electronics.
Different from previous mechanics models of related systems, our analysis does not
assume the thin film to cover the entire substrate, thereby explicitly
accounting for effects of edges and finite device sizes, both of which play
critically important roles in the mechanics and bending properties. These
thin-film islands give nonuniform stress, with maxima that often appear at the
edges and spatially non-uniform shear and normal stresses along the film/substrate
interface. Although these results are generally applicable to all classes of
