Buckling of Elastic Thin Films on Compliant Substrates for Determination of Surface Parameters

The buckling of an elastic thin film on a compliant substrate under small perturbation in normal deflection and tangential displacement is studied with the effect of surface energy and interfacial slip. It is revealed that Poisson's ratio of the soft substrate and the interfacial slip can be neglected for film's thickness smaller than tens of nanometers. The effect of surface energy nevertheless renders the critical strain for the onset of wrinkling and the wave length dependent on the thickness highly nonlinearly. The potential of using buckling of thin films on compliant substrates for determination of surface parameters has been discussed.