Measuring the local mechanical properties of a floating elastic sheet

Abstract

Polar regions are covered by sea ice, which can be seen as a thin solid elastic sheet with heterogeneous mechanical properties. The dynamics of deformation of a floating solid sheet are primarly governed by gravity, water density, and the flexural modulus, which depends on its mechanical properties, namely the thickness, the Young's Modulus and the Poisson ratio. Non-invasive methods from seismology can retrieve these three parameters from sheet deformation dynamics. In this article, we developed another method to extract locally the flexural modulus of a floating thin elastic sheet from the spatio-temporal deformations of the sheet. We perform laboratory experiment to test the accuracy and the robustness of this method on silicon membranes of controlled mechanical properties. Using patches of different thicknesses and shapes, we eventually draw maps of sheet thickness, with a sub-wavelength spatial resolution.