Related papers: Confined disclinations: exterior vs material const…
We consider a thin elastic sheet in the shape of a disk whose reference metric is that of a singular cone. I.e., the reference metric is flat away from the center and has a defect there. We define a geometrically fully nonlinear free…
We report simulation results on melts of entangled linear polymers confined in a free-standing thin film. We study how the geometric constraints imposed by the confinement alter the entanglement state of the system compared to the…
A collection of thin structures buckle, bend, and bump into each-other when confined. This contact can lead to the formation of patterns: hair will self-organize in curls; DNA strands will layer into cell nuclei; paper, when crumpled, will…
In the framework of linearized elasticity, we study thin elastic composite plates with thickness $\delta$. The plates contain small, rigid rectangular plates distributed periodically along $\varepsilon$. Between two neighboring rigid plates…
When a flat elastic strip is compressed along its axis, it is bent in one of two possible directions via spontaneous symmetry breaking and forms a cylindrical arc, a phenomenon well known as Euler buckling. When this cylindrical section is…
The apparently intractable shape of a fold in a compressed elastic film lying on a fluid substrate is found to have an exact solution. Such systems buckle at a nonzero wavevector set by the bending stiffness of the film and the weight of…
Thin elastic solids are easily deformed into a myriad of three-dimensional shapes, which may contain sharp localized structures as in a crumpled candy wrapper, or have smooth and diffuse features like the undulating edge of a flower.…
Tearing a thin sheet by forcing a rigid object through it leads to complex crack morphologies; a single oscillatory crack arises when a tool is driven laterally through a brittle sheet, while two diverging cracks and a series of…
A creased thin disk is generally bistable since the crease could be pushed through to form a stable cone-like inverted state with an elastic singularity corresponding to the vertex of the conical surface. In a recent study, we found that…
Gels are used to design bilayered structures with high residual stresses. The swelling of a thin layer on a compliant substrate leads to compressive stresses. The post-buckling of this layer is investigated experimentally; the wavelengths…
In this paper, we have studied, within a discrete WLC model, the spatial constraints in magnetic tweezers used in single molecule experiments. Two elements are involved: first, the fixed plastic slab on which is stuck the initial strand,…
Thin rigid sheets floating on a liquid substrate appear, for example, in coatings and surfactant monolayers. Upon uniaxial compression the sheet undergoes transitions from a compressed flat state to a periodic wrinkled pattern to a…
Motivated by the redrawing of hot glass into thin sheets, we investigate the shape and stability of a thin viscous sheet that is inhomogeneously stretched in an imposed non-uniform temperature field. We first determine the associated base…
A hydrostatically stressed soft elastic film circumvents the imposed constraint by undergoing a morphological instability, the wavelength of which is dictated by the minimization of the surface and the elastic strain energies of the film.…
A thin flat rectangular plate supported on its edges and subjected to in-plane loading exhibits stable post-buckling behaviour. However, the introduction of a nonlinear (softening) elastic foundation may cause the response to become…
We investigate the interaction between two cracks propagating in a thin sheet. Two different experimental geometries allow us to tear sheets by imposing an out-of-plane shear loading. We find that two tears converge along self-similar paths…
The shape of materials is often subject to a number of geometric constraints that limit the size of the system or fix the structure of its boundary. In soft and biological materials, however, these constraints are not always hard, but are…
Dislocation patterning and self-organization during plastic deformation are associated with work hardening, but the exact mechanisms remain elusive. This is partly because studies of the structure and local strain during the initial stages…
We study the effect of film density on the uniaxial compression of thin elastic films at a liquid--fluid interface. Using a combination of experiments and theory, we show that dense films first wrinkle and then fold as the compression is…
Many objects in nature and industry are wrapped in a thin sheet to enhance their chemical, mechanical, or optical properties. There are similarly a variety of methods for wrapping, from pressing a film onto a hard substrate, to using…