Crumpling an elasto-plastic thin sphere

Abstract

The phenomenon of crumpling is common in our daily life and nature. It exhibits many interesting properties, such as ultra-tough resistance to pressure with less than 30$\\%$ of volume density, power-law relation for pressure vs density, and crackling noises with occurrence frequency vs intensity mimicking that of earthquakes. These results are mainly obtained by using flat thin sheets. But, in reality the majority of crumpled objects exhibit nonzero intrinsic curvatures. Notable examples are crushed aluminum cans, car wreckage, and cells move in and out of blood vessels. In this work we concentrate on establishing the fact that they behave very differently from flat sheets by employing both experiments and molecular dynamics simulations.