Formation of peelable rough gold patterns on an ionic liquid template

Hierarchical wrinkles and oscillatory cracks in metal films deposited on liquid stripes

Fascinating crack and wrinkle patterns driven by stresses are ubiquitous in natural and artificial systems. It is of great interest to control the morphologies of stress-driven patterns by using facile techniques. Here we report on the spontaneous formation of hierarchical wrinkles and oscillatory cracks in metal films deposited on liquid (or soft polymer) stripes. It is found that the metal film is under a tensile stress during deposition owing to the thermal expansion of the liquid substrate. As the film thickness is beyond a critical value, oscillatory cracks with sawtoothlike shapes form on the liquid stripes. The ratio of crack oscillation period to amplitude is independent of the stripe width and film material, which can be well explained by the "brittle adhesive joints" model. After deposition, the metal film is under a compressive stress, which is relieved by formation of various wrinkle patterns. Hierarchical wrinkles with changing wavelengths form near the stripe edge while labyrinth or wavy wrinkles form at the center. Energy analysis was adopted to explain the formation and evolution of the wrinkle patterns. This study could promote better understanding of the formations of crack and wrinkle patterns in constrained film structures and controllable fabrication of stress-driven patterns by prefabricating liquid (or soft polymer) interlayer arrays.

Wrinkles on a textile-embedded elastomer surface with highly variable friction

Wrinkling of a soft elastomer surface capped by a relatively hard thin film or modified by some physical treatments to induce hardening has been widely studied for applications in fields such as low-cost micro-fabrication, optics and tribology. Here we show that a biaxial textile sheet embedded on the surface of an elastomer buckles and selectively forms anisotropic wrinkles when experiencing a compressive strain in the fibre axial direction. The wrinkles also possess a fine surface structure that originates from the periodic structure of the biaxial textile sheet. Depending on whether the surface is wrinkled or not, the unique frictional property due to which the friction on wrinkles significantly decreases by a factor of less than 0.1 because of the localized contact regions on the protrusions originating from the textile structure is shown.

Fabrication and optical enhancing properties of discrete supercrystals

Discrete gold nanoparticle crystals with tunable size and morphology are fabricated via a fast and inexpensive template-assisted method. The highly precise hierarchical organization of the plasmonic building blocks yields superstructures with outstanding behaviour for surface-enhanced Raman scattering analysis.

Reinforced shape-tunable microwrinkles formed on a porous-film-embedded elastomer surface

A new structural design is proposed for wrinkling to improve mechanical durability by exploiting a porous polymer film embedded on the surface of an elastomer, which acts as a hard layer, buckles into wrinkles and effectively suppresses fatal failures such as delamination and cracking.