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arXiv · 2303.01600

A wrinkled cylindrical shell as a tunable locking material

Pan Dong·Mengfei He·Nathan C. Keim·Joseph D. Paulsen
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Abstract

A buckled sheet offers a reservoir of material that can be unfurled at a later time. For sufficiently thin yet stiff materials, this geometric process has a striking mechanical feature: when the slack runs out, the material locks to further extension. Here we establish a simple route to a tunable locking material - a system with an interval where it is freely deformable under a given deformation mode, and where the endpoints of this interval can be changed continuously over a wide range. We demonstrate this type of mechanical response in a thin cylindrical shell subjected to axial twist and compression, and we rationalize our results with a simple geometric model.

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Pan Dong, Mengfei He, Nathan C. Keim, Joseph D. Paulsen. 2023-03-02. A wrinkled cylindrical shell as a tunable locking material. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.131.148201

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