2023/10/26 by R. Hutton, Hutton, R. S., Eduardo Vitral +5 · 1 citation
Engineering · #Adhesion, Friction, and Surface Interactions #Advanced Materials and Mechanics #FOS: Physical sciences #Modular Robots and Swarm Intelligence #Soft Condensed Matter (cond-mat.soft)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2310.17478
openalex publication_date 2023/10/26 · openalex created_date 2023/10/28 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Experiments reveal that structural transitions in thin sheets are mediated by the passage of transient and stable mobile localized elastic excitations. These ``crumples'' or ``d-cones'' nucleate, propagate, interact, annihilate, and escape. Much of the dynamics occurs on millisecond time scales. Nucleation sites correspond to regions where generators of the ideal unstretched surface converge. Additional stable intermediate states illustrate two forms of quasistatic inter-crumple interaction through ridges or valleys. These interactions create pairs from which extended patterns may be constructed in larger specimens. The onset of localized transient deformation with increasing sheet size is correlated with a characteristic stable crumple size, whose measured scaling with thickness is consistent with prior theory and experiment for localized elastic features in thin sheets. We offer a new theoretical justification of this scaling.