Poking and bulging of suspended thin sheets: Slippage, instabilities, and metrology

Abstract

Measurement of in-plane elasticity of thin sheets often leverages out-of-plane poking or bulging, also known as indentation or bulge tests. For linear elastic sheets, a load-cubic deflection relation has been frequently assumed so that the stiffness of the sheet could be readily extracted. However, we find that recent results of indentation and bulge tests on 2D materials do not support the assumption, which can be attributed to the slippage of 2D materials against their supporting substrates. Besides, the interfacial slippage could cause instabilities in the sheet such as radial wrinkles in suspended region, with finite lengths. To gain a quantitative understanding, we assume constant interfacial shear traction and study the wrinkling extent and the effective stiffness of thin sheets upon poking and bulging. We identify a single dimensionless parameter governing these mechanical responses—the sliding number—defined by comparing the sheet tension (that drives the slippage) with the interfacial traction (that resists the slippage). We discuss several useful asymptotic behaviors emerging at small and large sliding numbers. These understandings inspire when the effect of the interfacial slippage (as well as other substrate-associated subtleties) can be neglected in these tests. For instance, traditional bulge and indentation tests suffer from complexities caused by the slippage, pretension, Poisson's ratio, substrate roughness, and various interfacial traction-separation laws. Based on such understandings, we propose a simple poking/bulging methodology immune to all of these complexities, enabling an alternative way to measure the sheet stiffness.