The Transition Between Planar and Wrinkled Regions in a Uniaxially Stretched Thin Elastic Film

We study the transition from flat to wrinkled regions in a uniaxially stretched thin elastic film. We set up a model variational problem, and study the energy of its ground state. Using known scaling bounds for the minimal energy, the minimal energy can be written as a minimum of the underlying (convex) relaxed problem plus a term that grows linearly in the thickness of the film.We show that in the limit of vanishing thickness the prefactor in the scaling law for the original problem can be obtained by minimization of simpler scalar constrained variational problems.