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 µm and from 1.00 to 1.66 µm, 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.