Effect of plasticity and dimensionality on crumpling of a thin sheet

TL;DR

This study investigates how plasticity and dimensionality influence the crumpling behavior of thin sheets, revealing power-law relationships and a scaling law linking key exponents, validated through experiments on various materials.

Contribution

It disentangles the effects of plasticity and dimensionality on crumpling, providing experimental exponents and a scaling law that were previously unknown.

Findings

Power-law dependence of force and layers on crumpled ball size.

Exponents decrease linearly with increasing plasticity.

Scaling law predicts a linear relation between exponents with a coefficient of 3.5.

Abstract

The process of crumpling a sheet and compacting it into a ball is dependent on many parameters that are difficult to disentangle. We study the effect of plasticity on the crumpling process, and disentangle the effects of plasticity and dimensionality of compaction by performing isotropic compaction experiments on various materials with different elastoplasticities. The force required to crumple a sheet into a ball as well as the number of layers inside the ball have a power-law dependence on the size of the crumpled ball, each with its own power-law exponent. We experimentally determine both exponents and find that they are linearly proportional to and decrease with increasing plasticity of the material. Finally we provide a scaling argument predicting a linear relation between the two exponents with a coefficient of 3.5 in excellent agreement with our experimental results.