Blister patterns and energy minimization in compressed thin films on compliant substrates

This paper is motivated by the complex blister patterns sometimes seen in thin elastic films on thick, compliant substrates. These patterns are often induced by an elastic misfit which compresses the film. Blistering permits the film to expand locally, reducing the elastic energy of the system. It is natural to ask: what is the minimum elastic energy achievable by blistering on a fixed area fraction of the substrate? This is a variational problem involving both the {\it elastic deformation} of the film and substrate and the {\it geometry} of the blistered region. It involves three small parameters: the {\it nondimensionalized thickness} of the film, the {\it compliance ratio} of the film/substrate pair and the {\it mismatch strain}. In formulating the problem, we use a small-slope (F\"oppl-von K\'arm\'an) approximation for the elastic energy of the film, and a local approximation for the elastic energy of the substrate. For a 1D version of the problem, we obtain "matching" upper and lower bounds on the minimum energy, in the sense that both bounds have the same scaling behavior with respect to the small parameters. For a 2D version of the problem, our results are less complete. Our upper and lower bounds only "match" in their scaling with respect to the nondimensionalized thickness, not in the dependence on the compliance ratio and the mismatch strain. The upper bound considers a 2D lattice of blisters, and uses ideas from the literature on the folding or "crumpling" of a confined elastic sheet. Our main 2D result is that in a certain parameter regime, the elastic energy of this lattice is significantly lower than that of a few large blisters

The coarsening of folds in hanging drapes

We consider the elastic energy of a hanging drape -- a thin elastic sheet, pulled down by the force of gravity, with fine-scale folding at the top that achieves approximately uniform confinement. This example of energy-driven pattern formation in a thin elastic sheet is of particular interest because the length scale of folding varies with height. We focus on how the minimum elastic energy depends on the physical parameters. As the sheet thickness vanishes, the limiting energy is due to the gravitational force and is relatively easy to understand. Our main accomplishment is to identify the "scaling law" of the correction due to positive thickness. We do this by (i) proving an upper bound, by considering the energies of several constructions and taking the best; (ii) proving an ansatz-free lower bound, which agrees with the upper bound up to a parameter-independent prefactor. The coarsening of folds in hanging drapes has also been considered in the recent physics literature, using a self-similar construction whose basic cell has been called a "wrinklon." Our results complement and extend that work, by showing that self-similar coarsening achieves the optimal scaling law in a certain parameter regime, and by showing that other constructions (involving lateral spreading of the sheet) do better in other regions of parameter space. Our analysis uses a geometrically linear F\"{o}ppl-von K\'{a}rm\'{a}n model for the elastic energy, and is restricted to the case when Poisson's ratio is zero.Comment: 34 page

Scale-Invariant Extinction Time Estimates for Some Singular Diffusion Equations

(typos corrected 7/15/10 and 2/10/11) In honor of Louis Nirenberg’s 85th birthday We study three singular parabolic evolutions: the second-order total variation flow, the fourth-order total variation flow, and a fourth-order surface diffusion law. Each has the property that the solution becomes identically zero in finite time. We prove scale-invariant estimates for the extinction time, using a simple argument which combines an energy estimate with a suitable Sobolev-type inequality. YG is grateful to Professor Yoshie Sugiyama for informative remarks. Much of this work was done while YG visited the Courant Institute in Fall 2009; its hospitality is gratefully acknowledged, as is support from the Japa

Effective behavior of polycrystals that undergo martensitic phase transformation

The shape-memory effect is the ability of a material to recover, on heating, apparently plastic deformations that it suffers below a critical temperature. These apparently plastic strains are not caused by slip or dislocation, but by deformation twinning and the formation of other coherent microstructures by the symmetry-related variants of martensite. In single crystals, these strains depend on the transformation strain and can be quite large. However, in polycrystals made up of a large number of randomly oriented grains, the various grains may not deform cooperatively. Consequently, these recoverable strains depend on the texture and may be severely reduced or even eliminated. Thus, the shape-memory behavior of polycrystals may be significantly different from that of a single crystal. We address this issue by studying some model problems in the setting of anti-plane shear

Contextual directed acyclic graphs

Estimating the structure of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) from observational data remains a significant challenge in machine learning. Most research in this area concentrates on learning a single DAG for the entire population. This paper considers an alternative setting where the graph structure varies across individuals based on available "contextual" features. We tackle this contextual DAG problem via a neural network that maps the contextual features to a DAG, represented as a weighted adjacency matrix. The neural network is equipped with a novel projection layer that ensures the output matrices are sparse and satisfy a recently developed characterization of acyclicity. We devise a scalable computational framework for learning contextual DAGs and provide a convergence guarantee and an analytical gradient for backpropagating through the projection layer. Our experiments suggest that the new approach can recover the true context-specific graph where existing approaches fail

The sharp-interface limit of the action functional for Allen-Cahn in one space dimension

We analyze the sharp-interface limit of the action minimization problem for the stochastically perturbed Allen-Cahn equation in one space dimension. The action is a deterministic functional which is linked to the behavior of the stochastic process in the small noise limit. Previously, heuristic srguments and numerical result heve suggested that the limiting action should“count” two competing costs: the cost to nucleate interfaces and the cost to propagate them. In addition, constructions have been used to derive an upper bound for the minimal action which was proved optimal on the level of \it{scaling}. In this paper, we prove that for $(d=1)$, the upper bound achieved by the constructions is in fact sharp. Furthermore, we derive a lower bound for the functional itself, which is in agreement with the heuristic picture. To do so, we characterize the sharp-interface limit of the space-time energy measures. The proof relies on an extension of earlier results for the related elliptic problem