| Periodic surface nanostructures provide unique acoustic, electronic, optical and mechanical properties, with potential applications to metamaterials, sensors, catalysis, medicine, etc. However, assembling nanometer scale constituents into engineering scale components or devices poses tremendous challenges such as cost reduction and scalability. In this work, we will introduce a novel directed self-assembly method that has the potential to address these challenges by forming unidirectional micro- and nano-wrinkles on engineering scale polymer substrates. The approach utilizes a smart material, shape memory polymer (SMP), as the substrate in a bi-layer thin-film/substrate system. With a specially-designed programming scheme, the SMP substrate can retract in one direction while expand in the perpendicular direction in a heating process. Consequently, the thin film corrugates and the wrinkling patterns are aligned. A parametric study that investigates how the system parameters influence the surface topology will be presented. Besides wrinkles, surface defects that occurred concurrently were also observed. We will present a progressive damage scheme and a microdomain-based model to understand and possibly help preventing the formation of defects. In addition, this work will also address our efforts in shrinking the wrinkle feature size from several microns to the tens of nanometer range. Two methods, through which the minimum wrinkle wavelength was reduced from one micron to 300 nm and further down to 35 nm will be elaborated. Such aligned wrinkles whose wavelength spanning two orders of magnitude from as small as 35 nm to as large as 5 mum will open up avenues for numerous exciting applications. The application of using the self-assembled wrinkled surface as the back-reflector in solar cells to improve the power conversion efficiency will be discussed as a case study. The long-term stability of the wrinkle topology, which is essential to efficiency boost will be examined through a viscoelastic model. Another application of using wrinkled surfaces as templates to obtain one-dimensional nanoparticle arrays will be demonstrated. This complete bottom-up approach is simple, cost-effective and has the potential of large-scale fabrication. It is also expected to bring us much closer to transforming nanostructures into real products. |
