To my unfolding lend your prosperous ear.

March 9, 2021 1:49 PM

The Latest Wrinkle in Crumple Theory. "Crumpling belongs to the family of “compaction” questions, which probe, for instance, how viral RNA is packed in a protein capsid. And understanding how and why materials fail is vital, whether those materials are new metallic alloys or the thin-walled structures of cars and silos."

"Ms. Andrejević solved this problem, Dr. Rycroft said, “in spectacular style, by tracing the facets all out by hand.” Shmuel Rubinstein, also a principal investigator, now based at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said it was “a herculean effort, really, requiring a ton of work, and a ton of conviction.”

On average, the sheets of elastoplastic Mylar (about four-by-four inches square) possessed 880 facets; one specimen contained 3,810. As children in Serbia, Ms. Andrejević and her sister loved drawing. These days, their artistic focus is communicating science through graphic design and data visualization. (They are very close, and often discuss ideas with each other.) Ms. Andrejević used some of her drawing tools — not paper and colored pencils, but her tablet, Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop — to wrangle the contours of the creases. She hand-traced crease patterns for 24 scanned sheets, 21,110 facets in total."

posted by storybored (5 comments total)

The laws of crumpling!

I wonder how similar crumples are between materials.
posted by clew at 2:27 PM on March 9, 2021

Thanks for posting, will have a look later in week. Love the focus on sketching for solutions

Huh, amazing, I have a second soft-robotics / cybernetics FPP on the go covering crumpling and other odd movements - it's such a fast-growing field.
posted by unearthed at 3:49 PM on March 9, 2021 [1 favorite]

At first glance I thought this was gonna turn into another metafilter toilet paper preference thread
posted by sprezzy at 8:44 PM on March 9, 2021 [1 favorite]

Here's another odd crumpling system - Crumpling of thin sheets as a basis for creating mechanical metamaterials - good images too.

IDK how fast this system can crumple / uncrumple but I can imagine it having applications in springs, shock-absorption, even demolition.
posted by unearthed at 1:14 AM on March 10, 2021

Just last night, after spending hours on a particularly long problem set, my genius, coding-crazy son asked me, what's the point of learning geometry?

I'm going to show him this story. Thanks, storybored!
posted by martin q blank at 6:48 AM on March 10, 2021 [1 favorite]