Nonliving dehydrated leaves-inspired surface anti-wrinkling

“Living” organisms in nature exhibit robust and biologically intelligent surface anti-wrinkling. Nonetheless, the complexities of self-regulating stress or structural characteristics through growth or gene expression render the anti-wrinkling of “nonliving” artificial surfaces using bionic principles a pressing yet formidable challenge. Here, inspired by nonliving dehydrated leaves, we propose an on-demand customizable, material invariant, parametric surface anti-wrinkling strategy using leaf vein–imitated boundary curvature–coupled constraints. This strategy allows for an exact surface customization with enhanced anti-wrinkling capability, tailored to specific anti-wrinkling demands while maintaining the original cross-section materials. The defined parameters, anti-wrinkling width and concave radius, are customized by the anti-wrinkling design criteria via the dimensionless dual-correction stiffness model, which are simple linear or quadratic functions of anti-wrinkling demands and cross-section properties. Experiments at different scales and materials validate the correctness of the design criteria. The strategy in this study is effective on diverse wrinkle-prone surfaces at multiple scales and can inform real engineering design of the nonliving artificial surfaces.