Guided wrinkling in swollen, pre-patterned photoresist thin films with a crosslinking gradient

A new thin film buckling system was developed from photosensitive SU-8 thin films doped with UV light absorbing dye, resulting in a depth-wise gradient modulus after photocrosslinking. When the film was swollen by an organic solvent, a wide range of wrinkling patterns was obtained, including lamella, peanut and semi-hexagonal patterns. Both the morphology and wavelength were found to be dependent on the original film thickness. By leveraging the thermoplasticity of SU-8, we imprinted one-dimensional (1-D) patterns on the dyed SU-8 with variable pitch and height from 1 μm to 20 μm and 15 nm to 2 μm, respectively. We then swelled the patterned films and investigated the interactions between the intrinsic buckling waves (both size and morphology) and the pre-patterns. As the pre-pattern pitch decreased, the swollen film in the patterned region evolved from isotropic wrinkles to out-of-phase, anisotropic waves, which further became in-phase when the pre-pattern pitch was smaller than the intrinsic wrinkle wavelength. For the latter, the aligned wrinkle morphology varied dramatically when the pre-pattern height decreased: from perpendicular to the pre-pattern wavevector to dual orientation with one set of wrinkles remained perpendicularly ordered and the other set of local buckling patterns aligned in parallel to the pre-pattern, and finally back to isotropic ones. Since the pre-patterns of different size and shape could be readily prepared, the combination of physical confinement together with controlled swelling in a graded thin film offers a new approach to access a wide range of controllable hierarchical patterns.