Effects of interface sliding on the formation of telephone cord buckles

Sliding at interface during thin film buckling was reported by recent atomistic simulations. A stability analysis under the Föppl-von Kármán plate theory is performed to investigate the effect of interface sliding on the transition of a straight-sided blister to the telephone cord buckle in biaxially compressed thin films on rigid substrates. It is shown that the critical stress and the wavelength of the telephone cord buckle significantly increase as the interface sliding is noticeable in comparison with the constant values derived from previous classic analysis without interface sliding. Our theoretic analysis is further validated by results from numerical simulations based on our recently developed continuum model of nonlinear buckling. The results indicate that the wavelength variation in the telephone cord buckle observed in experiments may be due to interface sliding.