Rim curvature anomaly in thin conical sheets revisited.
This paper revisits one of the puzzling behaviors in a developable cone (d-cone), the shape obtained by pushing a thin sheet into a circular container of radius R by a distance η. The mean curvature was reported to vanish at the rim where the d-cone is supported. We investigate the ratio of the two principal curvatures versus sheet thickness h over a wider dynamic range than was used previously, holding R and η fixed. Instead of tending toward 1 as suggested by previous work, the ratio scales as (h/R)(1/3). Thus the mean curvature does not vanish for very thin sheets as previously claimed. Moreover, we find that the normalized rim profile of radial curvature in a d-cone is identical to that in a "c-cone" which is made by pushing a regular cone into a circular container. In both c-cones and d-cones, the ratio of the principal curvatures at the rim scales as (R/h)(5/2)F/(YR(2)), where F is the pushing force and Y is the Young's modulus. Scaling arguments and analytical solutions confirm the numerical results.
James Franck Institute and Department of Physics, University of Chicago, 929 East 57th Street, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA.
Jin W
JW
Wang