Stiff membranes on soft substrates tend to wrinkle under compression. The evolution of post-wrinkle instability through wrinkling, period doubling to quadruple folds, and/or creases with increasing compression has been extensively studied, but how to control this intriguing evolution remains challenging. Here, we obtain a scaling law for wrinkle evolution in which a single parameter, consisting of thickness contrast of the soft film to the stiff membrane and a material constant, determines the final instability order of the wrinkle evolution. In sharp contrast to the common view that the thickness effect of the soft substrate is negligible as the thickness contrast reaches a few tens, the soft film thickness plays a dominant role for thickness contrast across several orders of magnitude. The law proves to be universal in a sufficiently large range of materials and geometries and thus should play a general role in controlling the complex behavior of natural and artificial stiff/soft bilayer systems.

软质基材上的硬膜在压缩下容易起皱。通过起皱、周期加倍到四倍折叠和/或随着压缩增加的折痕，皱纹后不稳定性的演变已得到广泛研究，但如何控制这种有趣的演变仍然具有挑战性。在这里，我们获得了皱纹演变的比例定律，其中由软膜与硬膜的厚度对比和材料常数组成的单个参数决定了皱纹演变的最终不稳定顺序。与通常认为软基板的厚度效应在厚度对比度达到几十个时可以忽略不计的普遍观点形成鲜明对比的是，软膜厚度在几个数量级的厚度对比度中起着主导作用。