Morphological Phases of Crumpled Wire

Abstract

We find that in two dimensions wires can crumple into different morphologies and present the associated morphological phase diagram. Our results are based on experiments with different metallic wires and confirmed by numerical simulations using a discrete element model. We show that during crumpling, the number of loops increases according to a power-law with different exponents in each morphology. Furthermore, we observe a power-law divergence of the structure's bulk stiffness similar to what is observed in forced crumpling of membranes.