Excerpt:
‘Shall I uncrumple this much-crumpled thing?’ ~Wallace Stevens
"We have described the 'hydrogen atom' of crumpling," said Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, the Karl Van Tassel Career Development Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Much as chemists' understanding of the hydrogen atom aids their work in studying more complicated molecules, the new work will aid scientists' understanding of crumpling phenomena on scales ranging from the formation of mountains to the crinkled red blood cells that characterize one disease.
"We can never fully understand such phenomena, which are ubiquitous, without understanding the basic elements involved," Professor Mahadevan said.
Mountains, wrinkled pants and other crumpled materials all begin as a thin sheet, be it the Earth's crust or a smooth swatch of fabric. When that sheet is packed into a smaller volume -- as happens, for example, when you crush a piece of paper into a ball -- it crumples. And the basic element of a crumpled object is the cone-like structure.
"When there are many of these structures, they interact with each other and are responsible for the ridges and peaks that one observes in a crumpled sheet," Professor Mahadevan said.
"One only has to look as far as one's shirtsleeve or trouser knee to realize this -- a fact that is beautifully illustrated in the chiaroscuros of Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Durer showing the complex draping patterns of textiles." (da Vinci is referenced in the Nature paper.)
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"These seemingly mundane everyday problems are often anything but. Yet their very ubiquity challenges us to explain them," Professor Mahadevan concluded.
Coauthors of the Nature paper are Professors Enrique Cerda and Francisco Melo of the Universidad de Santiago de Chile and Sahraoui Chaieb, a postdoctoral associate in MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering....
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