Cutting and tearing thin elastic sheets: two novel single-period cracks and the first period-doubling crack

Abstract

Two novel single-period cracks were observed in experiments of cutting a folded sheet with a blunt object and tearing a thin brittle sheet under the guidance of a meterstick. Additionally, we observed a period-doubling crack in the tearing experiment. We cut and tore the sheet in different directions. The experimental results suggested that the anisotropy of the thin sheet played an important role in the formation of these two types of saw-tooth cracks. We demonstrated that the formation of the period-doubling crack was closely correlated with the changing of the contact region between the sheet and the meterstick. We also showed that the growth process of crack made by cutting was a logistic growth process (S-curve), while the cracks made by tearing propagated in the form of approximate power-law function.