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Anomalous strength of membranes with elastic ridges

B. A. DiDonna, T. A. Witten

cond-matarXiv:cond-mat/0104119

Abstract

We report on a simulational study of the compression and buckling of elastic ridges formed by joining the boundary of a flat sheet to itself. Such ridges store energy anomalously: their resting energy scales as the linear size of the sheet to the 1/3 power. We find that the energy required to buckle such a ridge is a fixed multiple of the resting energy. Thus thin sheets with elastic ridges such as crumpled sheets are qualitatively stronger than smoothly bent sheets.

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