Birth and decay of tensional wrinkles in hyperelastic sheets

We demonstrate with experiments that wrinkling in stretched latex sheets occurs over finite strains, and that their amplitudes grow and then decay to zero over a greater range of applied strains compared with linear elastic materials. The wrinkles occur provided the sheet is sufficiently thin compared to its width, and only over a finite range of length-to-width ratios. We show with simulations that the Mooney-Rivlin hyperelastic model describes the observed growth and decay of the wrinkles in our experiments. The decrease of wavelength with applied tension is found to be consistent with a far-from-threshold scenario proposed by Cerda and Mahadevan in 2003. However, the amplitude is observed to decrease with increasing tensile load, in contrast with the prediction of their original model. We address the crucial assumption of collapse of compressive stress, as opposed to collapse of compressive strain, underlying the far-from-threshold analysis, and test it by measuring the actual arc-length of the stretched sheet in the transverse direction and its difference from the width of a planar projection of the wrinkled shape. Our experiments and numerical simulations indicate a collapse of the compressive stress and reveal that a proper implementation of the far-from-threshold analysis is consistent with the nonmonotonic dependence of the amplitude on applied tensile load observed in experiments and simulations. Thus, our work support and extend far-from-threshold analysis to the stretching problem of rectangular hyperelastic sheets.