Sarong rolled around a body demonstrates the force for separating two sheets joined by folding and rolling is very large

TL;DR

This study investigates the large force generated when rolling a sarong around a body, revealing a quadratic relationship that could inspire new sheet-joining techniques and educational demonstrations.

Contribution

It introduces a simple model and experimental setup to analyze the force involved in rolling sheets, inspired by traditional sarong usage, with potential technological and educational applications.

Findings

Force increases proportionally to the square of the number of rolls

Simple equipment effectively captures the qualitative behavior

Potential for developing strong sheet-joining methods

Abstract

There are a lot of new sciences that have been inspired by common phenomena and even by old traditions practiced in our daily lives. Eventually, it may induce unexpected new technologies after deeply explored. In this paper, inspired by the wearing of traditional cloth, named sarong, by the community in the South East Asian countries and others, we investigated the behavior of sheets folded like rolling of sarong around the stomach. Simple equipment was designed to qualitatively collect the data and combined with simple modeling. Rolling of the sarong around the stomach generates the joining force of two sheets, increasing proportionally to the square of the number of rolling. This finding is potentially applied for developing a method for strongly joining sheets by simply rolling and releasing the join by simply unrolling. This work can also be simply duplicated elsewhere so that it is worthy of teaching materials at undergraduate levels. Both scientific and teaching contents can be extracted simultaneously.