Anomalous strength of membranes with elastic ridges.
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.
DiDonna
B A
BA
James Franck Institute, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA.
Witten
T A
TA