Delamination from an adhesive sphere: Curvature-induced dewetting versus buckling

Abstract

Everyday experience confirms the tendency of adhesive films to detach from spheroidal regions of rigid substrates -what is a petty frustration when placing a sticky bandage onto an elbow or knee is a more serious matter in the coating and painting industries. Irrespective of their resistance to bending, a key driver of such phenomena is Gauss' Theorema Egregium, which implies that naturally flat sheets cannot conform to doubly-curved surfaces without developing a strain whose magnitude grows sharply with the curved area. Previous attempts to characterize the onset of curvature-induced delamination, and the complex patterns it gives rise to, assumed a dewetting-like mechanism in which the propensity of two materials to form contact through interfacial energy is modified by an elastic energy penalty. We show that this approach may characterize moderately bendable adhesive sheets, but fails qualitatively to describe the curvature-induced delamination of ultrathin films, whose mechanics is governed by their propensity to buckle under minute levels of compression. Combining mechanical and geometrical considerations, we introduce a minimal model for curvature-induced delamination that accounts for two elementary buckling motifs, shallow "rucks" and localized "folds". We predict nontrivial scaling rules for the onset of curvature-induced delamination and various features of the emerging patterns, which compare well with experimental observations. Beyond gaining control on the use of ultrathin adhesives in cutting edge technologies such as stretchable electronics, our analysis is a significant step towards quantifying the multiscale morphological complexity that emerges upon imposing geometrical and mechanical constraints on highly bendable solid objects.