Wrinkling and imaging of thin curved sheets

Thin films or sheets subjected to external forces often undergo mechanical instability, leading to regular patterns of wrinkles, folds, and creases. As can be anticipated from the difficulty of flattening a curved globe, any natural curvature of the sheet will have a strong influence on these instabilities. Here, we develop a noninvasive synthetic schlieren imaging technique to image and reconstruct the surface of wrinkling curved sheets, confined to float on water. Our method circumvents the small-amplitude limit of related imaging techniques, and we demonstrate robust means to estimate the reconstruction accuracy. We then evaluate how the sign and magnitude of Gaussian curvature affect the wrinkling of thin curved sheets, and compare observations of the wrinkle wavelength, amplitude, and domain structure with recent theoretical predictions. While generally validating model predictions, we find that the assumption of a conserved surface area during wrinkling should be treated with some care. The control of wrinkling behavior demonstrated here can have applications in the design of liquid lenses, microfluidics, active textured surfaces, and flexible electronic components.