The morphology and folding patterns of buckling-driven thin-film blisters (Q1322751)

The authors analyze thin film blisters subjected to biaxial compression based on energy methods. Exploiting the perturbative character of bending in the thin-film limit, the analysis is split along the conventional lines of matched asymptotic expansions: the outer solution follows membrane energy minimization, which favours fine folding; the inner solution is dominated by bending. The effect of bending is manifold. It endows sharp edges in the membrane solution with a well-defined width and line tension, and it determines the wave-length of the folding and boundary undulations. Among all possible membrane solutions, it selects one which contains the least edge energy. The authors have conjectured that this preferred membrane solution follows as the result of a simple envelope construction. In certain cases, consideration of line tension enables quantitative predictions of the radius of curvature of the boundary, and provides a rationale for explaining the occurrence of telephone-cord morphologies.