Localized tension-induced giant folding in unstructured elastic sheets.

ABSTRACT: Buckling in compression is the archetype of elastic instability: when compressed along its longest dimension, a thin structure such as a playing card will buckle out-of-plane accommodating the imposed compression without a significant change of length. However, recent studies have demonstrated that tension applied to sheets with microscopic structure leads to out-of-plane deformation in applications from "groovy metasheets" for multistable morphing to kirigami grippers. Here, we demonstrate that this counterintuitive behavior-a large transverse folding induced by a relatively small imposed longitudinal tension-occurs also in unstructured sheets of isotropic material. The key to this behavior is that a localized uniaxial tension induces giant folding; we refer to this as "localized tension-

SUBMITTER: Guo K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12107157 | biostudies-literature | 2025 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature