Localized tension-induced giant folding in unstructured elastic sheets

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Guo, Kexin; Sune, Marc; Kwok, Ming Li; Hsia, K. Jimmy; Liu, Mingchao; Vella, Dominic
• 署名单位: Nanyang Technological University; University of Oxford; Nanyang Technological University; University of Birmingham
• 刊物名称: PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0027-13349
• DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2423439122
• 发表日期: 2025-05-20

摘要

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-induced giant (TUG) folding to reflect the importance of localized tension, and its mode of actuation and the similarity of the loading condition to `tugging' the sheet. We show that localized TUG folding occurs because of an efficient transfer of applied tensile load into compression-a geometric consequence of a localized applied tension. We determine scaling results for the folding angle as a function of applied strain in agreement with both experiments and simulations. The generic nature of localized TUG folding suggests that it might be utilized in a broader range of materials and structures than previously realized.