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Significance Thin films readily buckle to relax compression, creating wrinkle patterns that may cover large portions of the solid. Predicting the arrangement of wrinkles in general settings is a major challenge that affects our understanding of stresses and deformations in textiles, biological tissues, and synthetic skins. We identify a mesoscale structure that arises from the incompatibility of uniformly spaced wrinkles and a spatially varying director, unraveling an organizing principle with analogs in liquid crystalline and superconducting states of matter. 

Although thin films are typically manufactured in planar sheets or rolls, they are often forced into three-dimensional (3D) shapes, producing a plethora of structures across multiple length scales. To understand this complex response, previous studies have either focused on the overall gross shape or the small-scale buckling that decorates it. A geometric model, which considers the sheet as inextensible yet free to compress, has been shown to capture the gross shape of the sheet. However, the precise meaning of such predictions, and how the gross shape constrains the fine features, remains unclear. Here, we study a thin-membraned balloon as a prototypical system that involves a doubly curved gross shape with large amplitude undulations. By probing its side profiles and horizontal cross-sections, we discover that the mean behavior of the film is the physical observable that is predicted by the geometric model, even when the buckled structures atop it are large. We then propose a minimal model for the horizontal cross-sections of the balloon, as independent elastic filaments subjected to an effective pinning potential around the mean shape. Despite the simplicity of our model, it reproduces a broad range of phenomena seen in the experiments, from how the morphology changes with pressure to the detailed shape of the wrinkles and folds. Our results establish a route to combine global and local features consistently over an enclosed surface, which could aid the design of inflatable structures, or provide insight into biological patterns. 

A basic paradigm underlying the Hookean mechanics of amorphous, isotropic solids is that small deformations are proportional to the magnitude of external forces. However, slender bodies may undergo large deformations even under minute forces, leading to nonlinear responses rooted in purely geometric effects. Here we study the indentation of a polymer film on a liquid bath. Our experiments and simulations support a recently-predicted stiffening response [D. Vella and B. Davidovitch, Phys. Rev. E , 2018, 98 , 013003], and we show that the system softens at large slopes, in agreement with our theory that addresses small and large deflections. We show how stiffening and softening emanate from nontrivial yet generic features of the stress and displacement fields. 

Many objects in nature and industry are wrapped in a thin sheet to enhance their chemical, mechanical, or optical properties. Similarly, there are a variety of methods for wrapping, from pressing a film onto a hard substrate to inflating a closed membrane, to spontaneously wrapping droplets using capillary forces. Each of these settings raises challenging nonlinear problems involving the geometry and mechanics of a thin sheet, often in the context of resolving a geometric incompatibility between two surfaces. Here, we review recent progress in this area, focusing on highly bendable films that are nonetheless hard to stretch, a class of materials that includes polymer films, metal foils, textiles, and graphene, as well as some biological materials. Significant attention is paid to two recent advances: a novel isometry that arises in the doubly-asymptotic limit of high flexibility and weak tensile forcing, and a simple geometric model for predicting the overall shape of an interfacial film while ignoring small-scale wrinkles, crumples, and folds.