A three-dimensional X-ray tomography is performed to investigate the internal structure and its evolution of a crumpled aluminum foil. The upper and lower bounds of the internal geometric fractal dimension are determined, which increase with the compression. Contrary to the simulation results, we find that the mass distribution changes from being inhomogeneous to uniform. Corroborated with the evidence from previous experiments, these findings support the physical picture that the elastic property precedes the plastic one at dominating the deformation and mechanical response for all crumpled structures. We show that the interior of a crumpled ball at the plastic regime can be mapped to the compact packing of a granular system.
Crumpled thin sheets are complex fractal structures whose physical properties are influenced by a hierarchy of ridges. In this Letter, we report experiments that measure the stress-strain relation and show the coexistence of phases in the stretching of crumpled surfaces. The pull stress showed a change from a linear Hookean regime to a sublinear scaling with an exponent of $0.65 \pm 0.03$, which is identified with the Hurst exponent of the crumpled sheets. The stress fluctuations are studied, the statistical distribution of force peaks is analyzed and it is shown how the unpacking of crumpled …
Hand crumpled paper balls involve intricate structure with a network of creases and vertices, yet show simple scaling properties, which suggests self-similarity of the structure. We investigate the internal structure of crumpled papers by the micro computed tomography (micro-CT) without destroying or unfolding them. From the reconstructed three dimensional data, we examine several power laws for the crumpled square sheets of paper of the sizes $L=50\sim 300$ mm, and obtain the mass fractal dimension $D_M = 2.7\pm 0.1$ by the relation between the mass and the radius of gyration of the balls, an…
As a confined thin sheet crumples, it spontaneously segments into flat facets delimited by a network of ridges. Despite the apparent disorder of this process, statistical properties of crumpled sheets exhibit striking reproducibility. Experiments have shown that the total crease length accrues logarithmically when repeatedly compacting and unfolding a sheet of paper. Here, we offer insight to this unexpected result by exploring the correspondence between crumpling and fragmentation processes. We identify a physical model for the evolution of facet area and ridge length distributions of crumple…
Crumpling an ordinary thin sheet transforms it into a structure with unusual mechanical behaviors, such as enhanced rigidity, emission of crackling noise, slow relaxations, and memory retention. A central challenge in explaining these behaviours lies in understanding the contribution of the complex geometry of the sheet. Here, we combine cyclic driving protocols and 3D imaging to correlate the global mechanical response and the underlying geometric transformations in unfolded crumpled sheets. We find that their response to cyclic strain is intermittent, hysteretic, and encodes a memory of the …