# Nonlinear mechanics of rigidifying curves

## TL;DR

This paper investigates how rigidifying curves influence the nonlinear mechanics of thin shells, revealing their role in reducing linear isometries and enabling easier folding through nonlinear strain effects, with explicit solutions and geometric validation.

## Contribution

It introduces a nonlinear strain framework to explain folding along rigidifying curves and provides explicit solutions and geometric insights into shell isometries.

## Key findings

- Rigidifying curves reduce linear isometries.
- Nonlinear strains enable easier folding along these curves.
- Explicit solutions demonstrate nonlinear folding isometries.

## Abstract

Thin shells are characterized by a high cost of stretching compared to bending. As a result isometries of the midsurface of a shell play a crucial role in their mechanics. In turn, curves with zero normal curvature play a critical role in determining the number and behavior of isometries. In this paper, we show how the presence of these curves results in a decrease in the number of linear isometries. Paradoxically, shells are also known to continuously fold more easily across these rigidifying curves than other curves on the surface. We show how including nonlinearities in the strain can explain this phenomena and demonstrate folding isometries with explicit solutions to the nonlinear isometry equations. In addition to explicit solutions, exact geometric arguments are given to validate and guide our analysis in a coordinate free way.