Wrinkled surfaces have garnered much interest over the past decade as they provide a facile route to nanostructured surfaces. The typical route to wrinkles is through mechanical stretching of a rigid thin film attached to an elastomeric substrate, typically PDMS. In this work, we describe a simple route to generating wrinkles in a single step through photoinitiated polymerization of furfuryl alcohol coatings. Use of hydrophobic photoacid generators (PAGs) generates a local enhancement of PAG at the air interface from wetting considerations, which in turn leads to increased polymerization at the surface with UV exposure.Here we will discuss the role of the coating thickness, humidity and selection of the PAG on the morphological characteristics of the wrinkles. As the coating thickness increases, there is an increase in the amplitude of the wrinkles without any statistical change in the wrinkle wavelength. Conversely, humidity impacts the wrinkle wavelength due to changes in the proton diffusion when water is present in the furfuryl alcohol. For samples using triphenyl sulfonium triflate as the PAG, there is a transition from wrinkling (top) to creasing (bottom) that is observed as the thickness of the coating increases

Wrinkled surfaces from polymerization of furfuryl alcohol using photoinitiators

246th National Meeting (2013)

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