Bioinspired Fabrication of Free-Standing Conducting Films with Hierarchical Surface Wrinkling Patterns

Mechanical instability has been shown to play an important role in the formation of wrinkle structures in biofilms, which not only can adopt instability modes as templates to regulate their 3D architectures but also can tune internal stresses to achieve stable patterns. Inspired by nature, we report a mechanical-chemical coupling method to fabricate free-standing conducting films with instability-driven hierarchical micro/nanostructured patterns. When polypyrrole (PPy) film is grown on an elastic substrate via chemical oxidation polymerization, differential growth along with in situ self-reinforcing effect induces stable wrinkle patterns with different scales of wavelengths. The self-reinforcing effect modifies the internal stresses, hence PPy films with intact wrinkles can be removed from substrates and further transferred onto target substrates for functional device fabrication. To understand the buckling mechanics, we construct a model which reveals the formation of hierarchical wrinkle patterns.