Anomalous strength of membranes with elastic ridges

Phys Rev Lett. 2001 Nov 12;87(20):206105. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.87.206105. Epub 2001 Oct 30.

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.