Wrinkles on a textile-embedded elastomer surface with highly variable friction

Abstract

Wrinkling of a soft elastomer surface capped by a relatively hard thin film or modified by some physical treatments to induce hardening has been widely studied for applications in fields such as low-cost micro-fabrication, optics and tribology. Here we show that a biaxial textile sheet embedded on the surface of an elastomer buckles and selectively forms anisotropic wrinkles when experiencing a compressive strain in the fibre axial direction. The wrinkles also possess a fine surface structure that originates from the periodic structure of the biaxial textile sheet. Depending on whether the surface is wrinkled or not, the unique frictional property due to which the friction on wrinkles significantly decreases by a factor of less than 0.1 because of the localized contact regions on the protrusions originating from the textile structure is shown.