Crumpling under an ambient pressure

TL;DR

This study investigates how sheets crumple under ambient pressure, revealing power law behaviors dependent on material properties and identifying a transition to a jammed state at high pressures.

Contribution

It introduces a pressure chamber setup to analyze crumpling, showing material-dependent exponents and the breakdown of power law behavior at high pressures.

Findings

Power law between force and radius with material-dependent exponents

Discontinuous drop in compressibility indicating jamming transition

Universal exponent of 0.25 not observed in experiments

Abstract

A pressure chamber is designed to study the crumpling process under an ambient force. The compression force and its resulting radius for the ball obey a power law with an exponent that is independent of the thickness and initial size of the sheet. However, the exponent is found to be material-dependent and less than the universal value, 0.25, claimed by the previous simulations. The power law behavior disappears at high pressure when the compressibility drops discontinuously, which is suggestive of a jammed state.