English

Anomalous strength of membranes with elastic ridges

Condensed Matter 2009-11-07 v1

Abstract

We report on a simulational study of the compression and buckling of elastic ridges formed by joining the boundary of a flat sheet to itself. Such ridges store energy anomalously: their resting energy scales as the linear size of the sheet to the 1/3 power. We find that the energy required to buckle such a ridge is a fixed multiple of the resting energy. Thus thin sheets with elastic ridges such as crumpled sheets are qualitatively stronger than smoothly bent sheets.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0104119,
  title  = {Anomalous strength of membranes with elastic ridges},
  author = {B. A. DiDonna and T. A. Witten},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0104119},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

4 pages, REVTEX, 3 figures