Mechanics of Strain-limiting wrinkled kirigami for flexible devices: High flexibility, stretchability and compressibility

Flexible devices that provide elastic responses to ultrahigh deformations are of growing interest due to the ability to enable new applications whose feasibility is impossible to be attained by using the traditional wafer-based technologies. This paper focuses on strain-limiting wrinkled kirigami materials that offer coexistent high flexibility, stretchability and compressibility, as well as its mechanics design strategies that can be suitable for both discrete and distributed flexible systems, enabling them to accommodate extreme mechanical deformations without damage, such as stretching, compressing and twisting like a rubber ribbon. Comprehensive and systematic theoretical studies of the mechanics reveal how to leverage the different dimensionless geometric parameters to regulate buckling responses of the system, such as global buckling and local wrinkling, and the way in which the parameterized designs enable highly parallel extreme mechanical properties. To some extent, flexibility, stretchability and compressibility can be enhanced by several orders of magnitude, except for some counterintuitive expectations. The predicted results, as validated and demonstrated through in-situ tensile experiments and numerical calculations, provide an underpinning to unveil the concealed relationships between nonlinear mechanics responses and microstructural geometries as well as material properties of strain-limiting wrinkled kirigami. This paper suggests a promising route to high-performance flexible devices regarding the stretchable conductors and piezoelectric harvesters.