Experimental analysis of interfacial shear stress and electrical resistance of indium tin oxide-coated polyethylene terephthalate films for a whole folding test

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to analyze the performance of the flexible conductive substrate by interfacial shear stress. This study performed automatic liquid-crystal modulating common-path interferometry (LMCI) optical inspections on 125-µm polyethylene terephthalate (PET) substrates having indium tin oxide (ITO) coating thicknesses of 80 nm, 160 nm, and 230 nm. The nonlinear characteristic of the stress-optical coefficient of the ITO material is obtained using LMCI. To validate the performance of the flexible conductive substrate, this study has utilized an automatic sliding-folding testing platform (ASTP) for a whole-folding test. Eventually, this study successfully has utilized interface shear stresses to validate the performance of the flexible conductive substrate depended on the different thicknesses of the conductive layers for whole-folding test by using LMCI and ASTP. According to the measurement results, as the folding radii decrease and the ITO thicknesses of ITO-coated PET substrates increase, the changes of interfacial shear stresses increase in compressive direction and the change-rates of electrical resistance of ITO-coated PET substrate also increase. Therefore, the interfacial shear stress measurement and analysis results depicted on flexible conductive substrates provide a validation for improving the manufacturing process and for reducing process residual stresses.