A variation in wrinkle structures of UV-cured films with chemical structures of prepolymers

Abstract

Spontaneously wrinkled films can be easily obtained from UV-crosslinkable liquid prepolymers under special UV-curing conditions. They vary wrinkle structures of the UV-cured films and, however, cannot be precisely controlled. Here, five different UV-crosslinkable prepolymers are synthesized to study the chemical structure effect of prepolymers on wrinkle formation and modulation of the UV-cured films irrespective of the UV-curing conditions. Both wavelength and amplitude of the wrinkles are tuned with the different liquid prepolymers from 4.10 to 5.63 mu m and from 1.00 to 1.66 mu m, respectively. The wrinkle structures of the UV-cured films are faded by adding a solid prepolymer to a liquid prepolymer due to interference from it in the shrinkage of the liquid prepolymer layer. The wrinkles completely disappear in the UV-cured films fabricated from the formulated prepolymers containing over 50 wt% of the solid prepolymer. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.