The eect of plasticity in crumpling

of thin sheets: Supplementary

Information
T. Tallinen, J. A.

Astrom and J. Timonen
Video S1. The video shows crumpling of an elastic sheet with a width to
thickness ratio of L/h = 500 and a Youngs modulus of Y = 1 GPa.
Video S2. Crumpling of an elasto-plastic sheet. The sheet has the same
parameters as the one in Video S1, and in addition a yield stress of 10 MPa.
1. Simulation model
A model for thin sheets of elastic or elasto-plastic material was constructed
as a triangular lattice with spacing a and size up to 1,000 x 1,000 lattice
points. Each lattice point had mass m and moment of inertia I, and they
were connected by beam elements. The beams had a 12 x 12 stiness matrix
corresponding to three translational and three rotational degrees of freedom
at both ends of the beam. The large thickness of the beams was accounted
for by including shear eects in the formulation of the stiness matrix. Mo-
tion of local degrees of freedom in the beams was opposed by small viscous
damping. The magnitude of damping was such that the motion of any sin-
gle beam was under-damped. Large displacements of beams were taken into
account by separating the rigid body rotation of the beam from its local
deformation. This kind of formulation for handling large displacements has
been used in FEM (see e.g. Criseld, M. A. A. Comput. Methods Appl. Mech.
Engrg. 81, 131 (1990)) and in the dynamics of deformable bodies (Erleben,
K. et al. Physics-based animation, Charles River Media (2005)). The beams
had width a, Youngs modulus Y
b
and Poisson ratio = 1/3. To account
1
Figure 1: Illustration of the simulation model. Stripped visualization
shows spheres and skeletons of beams. The sheet thickness h is the same
as the sphere diameter d, lattice constant a and the length and width of a
beam. The conning shell around the sheet is shown (semi)transparent.
for elasto-plasticity, all deformations exceeding a plastic yield point of beams
in tensile strain, bending or torsion were irreversible and resulted in con-
stant stress beyond the yield point. For example, if the tensile strain of a
beam exceeded its maximum elastic strain, its tension remained at the value
of the yield tension. When the tension was released, the beam recovered
its original length added by the amount of plastic strain beyond the yield
point. Derivation of the elements of the stiness matrix as well as the elastic
limits was made in accordance with standard methods of structural analy-
sis (e.g. Timoshenko, S. Strength of materials, 3rd ed., Krieger Publishing
(1976)). Self-avoidance of the sheet was introduced by having an elastic fric-
tionless sphere of radius a/2 and Youngs modulus Y
s
= Y
b
at each lattice
point. Spheres did not interact with their nearest neighbours so that they
did not aect the in-plane compressibility of the sheet. Otherwise, overlap-
ping spheres had a repulsive (compression) force proportional to their depth
of overlap and the Youngs modulus Y
s
. Elastic or elasto-plastic energy of
the sheet was calculated as a sum of deformation energies of the individ-
ual beams (energies of stretching/compression, bending and torsion of the
beams were summed up) and compression energies of the spheres. Crum-
pling was induced by a spherical shell enclosing the sheet, as in Fig. 1 and in
the Supplementary videos. If a sphere was in contact with the shell, it was
2
given a force towards the center of the shell. The magnitude of this force
was also proportional to the depth of overlap and the Youngs modulus Y .
The shell radius was let to shrink slowly such that the kinetic energy of the
sheet remained very small compared to its deformation energy (except for
possible spontaneous bucklings of the sheet). The total conning force was
determined as the sum of radial compression forces of the spheres in contact
with the enclosing shell. Newtons equations of motion were explicitly solved
at each time step to propagate the simulation in time. The time step was set
as dt =

m
4aY
b
. Crumpling of sheets with 10
6
lattice points required about
10
7
time steps.
2. Scaling of ridge energy
Theoretical results indicate that in the limit of high aspect ratio L/h, the
energy of a single ridge in a fully elastic sheet is proportional to (L/h)
1/3
(Lobkovsky, A. et al. Science 270, 1482 (1995)). As a test for our numerical
model we simulated the energy of a single ridge as a function of sheet size
L (xed h), for both elastic and elasto-plastic sheets. In elastic sheets the
ridge energy indeed became proportional to (L/h)
1/3
very soon the sheet size
exceeded L/h 100 (see Fig. 2).
In elasto-plastic sheets the ridge energy was initially (small L/h) clearly
smaller than in the corresponding elastic sheets, but approached the latter
for increasing sheet size, and became at the same time approximately pro-
portional to (L/h)
1/3
. This scaling result is also shown in Fig. 2 together
with an example of a plastic ridge. For short ridges plastic yielding appeared
along the whole ridge, but as L/h increased, a threshold was reached beyond
which the middle part of the ridge remained elastic. This threshold strongly
depended on the bending angle and the yield point (for an angle of /2 and a
yield point of
y
/Y = 0.01 the threshold value of L/h was few hundred). It is
evident that in long enough ridges the plastic deformations are concentrated
in relatively small areas in the vicinities of vertices (as suggested based on
the behaviour of fully elastic sheets in Witten, T. A. Rev. Mod. Phys. 79,
643 (2007)), and that the elastic deformation energy dominates the total en-
ergy in this limit. Validity of elastic theory for elasto-plastic vertices has also
been shown experimentally in Mora, T. & Boudaoud, A. Europhys. Lett. 59,
643 (2007).
3
10
1
10
2
10
3
10
0
10
1
L/h
E
/

Elastic
Elastoplastic
(L/h)
1/3
Figure 2: Deformation energy of a single ridge as a function of its
length. To form a ridge, two opposing sides of a sheet were bent to an angle
/2. An example of a ridge in an elasto-plastic sheet is shown on the left.
The areas which contain plastic yielding are marked red. On the right the
energy of the ridge is shown as a function of L/h for both elastic and elasto-
plastic sheets. The expected (L/h)
1/3
scaling is marked with a dashed line.
This kind of conguration was also called the minimal ridge by Lobkovsky
(Phys. Rev. E 53, 3750 (1996)).
3. Scaling of total energy
A scaling form for the total energy has been derived by dimensional analy-
sis in the form E
t
(K
0
R
2
0
/)

V G
/
V G
(R
f
/R
0
)
11/
V G
, where K
0
is a 2-d
Youngs modulus, R
0
the initial radius of a spherical shell enclosing a at cir-
cular sheet and R
f
its nal radius (Vliegenthart, G. A. & Gompper, G. Nature
Materials 5, 216 (2006)). The exponents alpha and beta used in the ex-
pression above are denoted here with a subscript V G. Noting that Y h
3
,
K
0
Y h and R
0
L, we nd that E
t
(L/h)
2
V G
/
V G
(R
f
/L)
11/
V G
.
This expression is similar to equation (1) in the main article, and pro-
vides a mapping between the alphas and betas: 2
V G
/
V G
= and
1 1/
V G
= ( 2).
4
0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
0.7
0.75
0.8
0.85
0.9
0.95
1
Fraction of energy

A


L/h = 1000
L/h = 500
L/h = 250
10
0
10
2
10
4
10
2

A


Crumpled sheet

5/4
a b
Figure 3: Focusing of energy. In a cumulative distributions of deformation
energy in crumpled elastic sheets (R/R
0
= 0.18) are shown. In b the fraction

A
of the sheet area in which the energy density exceeds is shown. A
corresponding energy map with logarithmic colour coding is shown in the
inset.
4. Focusing of deformation energy
Previous studies on elastic sheets indicate also that deformation energy is
focused on an increasingly smaller fraction of the area of the crumpled
sheet when the sheet size is increased (Kramer, E. M. & Witten, T. A.
Phys. Rev. Lett. 78, 1303 (1997)). We tested this conclusion with positive
results by simulating distributions of local deformation energy with our nu-
merical model, and show results for elastic sheets with dierent aspect ratios
in Fig. 3a. In addition, focusing of energy in a loosely crumpled elastic sheet
(Fig. 3b) was in good agreement with the prediction that the area fraction
of the sheet in which the energy density exceeds a given value should scale
as
5/4
(Didonna, B. A. et al. Phys. Rev. E 65, 016603 (2001)).
We can thus conclude that our numerical model correctly describes the known
individual ridge energy and energy focusing behaviours of fully elastic sheets,
and seems also to extend such behaviours into elasto-plastic sheets in a reli-
able manner.
5
5. Facet extraction
To determine the facet size distributions of crumpled sheets, 2-d mean cur-
vature maps were thresholded resulting in binary images where areas of pos-
itive and negative curvature were marked respectively as black and white
(Fig. 4). The local mean curvature of the sheet was extracted from the
mesh of lattice sites (Desburn, M. SIGGRAPH99, 317-324). The black and
white areas were then split into separate roughly convex regions by applying
the watershed algorithm (see e.g. Meyer, F. Signal processing 38, 113-125
(1994)). These regions describe relatively at parts of the sheet surrounded
by features of clearly higher local curvature, called ridges and vertices when
the curvature becomes high enough. We call these regions facets. Facet areas
where determined in pixels and their relative linear sizes were determined as
square roots of the areas divided by the linear size L of the sheet. Facets
with a size smaller than L/100 were omitted from the analysis. This proce-
dure does not rely on any assumption regarding the detailed shape or energy
content of the ridges. It is thus straightforward to apply at any degree of
crumpling and in sheets of varying width to thickness ratio.
Facet size distributions in crumpled sheets were reasonably well described
by a lognormal distribution N(x) exp[(ln(x) )
2
/(2
2
)]/(x) (Fig. 5).
The found standard deviations 0.5 for the logarithms of linear facet
sizes correspond to 1.0 for the facet areas in excellent agreement with
the 1.17 found for crumpled paper in Andresen, C. A., Hansen, A.
& Schmittbuhl, J. Phys. Rev. E 76, 026108 (2007). For ridge lengths l in
simulated crumpled elastic sheets a lognormal distribution given in the form
N(l) exp[(log(l/l
0
))
2
/b)]/(

bl) has earlier been found with b = 0.95

(Vliegenthart, G. A. & Gompper, G. Nature Materials 5, 216 (2006)). This
corresponds to 0.7, and is also in good agreement with the present
results. The lognormal distribution found for the ridge lengths in crumpled
paper (Blair, D. L. & Kudrolli, A. Phys. Rev. Lett. 94, 166107 (2005)) is
as well in agreement with the present result although is a bit wider (
1.2 1.4). A wider ridge length distribution may arise from the fact that a
single facet is surrounded by multiple ridges of varying length.
In the case of elastic sheets, a slightly better t in comparison with a lognor-
mal t was provided by a gamma distribution N(x) x
a1
/[b
a
(a)]exp(x/b)
with the shape parameter a = 4.0 (Fig. 5). A gamma distribution has previ-
ously been found for the segment lengths of a 1-d model of crumpling, owing
to interaction at high connement of segment layers (Sultan, E. & Boudaoud,
6
Figure 4: Illustration of facet segmentation. a, Mean curvature eld
of a crumpled sheet. b, Thresholded areas of positive (white) and negative
(black) curvature. c, The thresholded image segmented into regions which
approximate facets.
0.025 0.05 0.1 0.2
10
0
10
1
x/L
N
(
x
)


Elastic
Elastoplastic
Lognormal
Lognormal
Gamma
Figure 5: Facet size distributions. Distributions of linear facet size are
shown for elasto-plastic (yield stress
y
= 0.01Y ) and elastic sheets of size
L/h = 1000. Both distributions are averages over those for six sheets crum-
pled to R/R
0
= 0.18. The parameters of the lognormal distribution t (see
text) for elastic sheets are = 2.90 and = 0.52 and for elasto-plastic
sheets they are = 3.15 and = 0.47. The parameters of the gamma
distribution t for elastic sheets are a = 4.0 and b = 0.015.
A. Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 136103 (2006)). Crumpled elastic sheets display a
much more stronger layering than elasto-plastic sheets, and this may explain
their somewhat dierent facet size distributions.
7
6. Packing by repeated folding
Folding a sheet repeatedly by the simplest possible (symmetric) way results
in a tiled pattern of facets in the sheet. A pattern after four such foldings
is illustrated in Fig. 6a. The pattern is always similar after a xed number
of repeated folds, no matter what is the size of the sheet. In about a half
of the simulations of elastic sheets (Tallinen,

Astrom and Timonen, to be
published) an almost symmetrically folded pattern appeared in the beginning
of crumpling. Such patterns for two dierent sizes of the elastic sheet are
shown in the top row of Fig. 6b. It is evident that these patterns are
statistically similar (ridge patterns for more randomly crumpled elastic sheets
are also statistically similar) and resemble that of a repeatedly folded sheet.
In contrast with this, the ridge patterns in elasto-plastic sheets at xed R/R
0
(the bottom row of Fig. 6b) are not similar since the amounts of ridges and
vertices clearly increase with increasing size of the sheet. In repeated folding
the size (X) of the facets scales linearly with the width (R) of the folded
conguration, X R. Under crumpling we thus expect a similar power law
scaling of facet size, but as crumpling is a random process, the mean size of
Figure 6: Repeated folding. a, A ridge pattern resulting from repeated
folding along the central line. Black and white indicate the two possible
directions of folds. b, Ridge patterns at R/R
0
0.25 for elastic and elasto-
plastic sheets. The sheets with L/h = 250 are scaled to the same size as the
sheets with L/h = 1000.
8
the facets necessarily decreases faster than the size of the whole conguration
(repeated folding has the maximal ridge length at each stage).
An attempt has already been made (Plouraboue, F. & Roux, S. Physica A
227, 173-182 (1996)) to generalize ideal folding into a model with random
folds.
7. Fractal dimensions
To nd the fractal dimensions of crumpled elastic and elasto-plastic sheets
we crumpled sheets with width to thickness ratios in the interval [100, 1000].
Crumpling was done slowly and the conning force was monitored. The force
at which the nal radius of the crumpled conguration was measured was
chosen such that the volume fraction of the conguration was reasonable. For
example, the nal volume fractions of the smallest elastic sheets (L/h = 100)
with a conning force of 50 N were around one third, while those of the
biggest sheets simulated (L/h = 1000) were around 10%. The nal radii of
the crumpled sheets were plotted as a function of L to determine if there
was a relationship R L
2/D
(this is equivalent to M R
D
, since M L
2
).
From this relationship the mass fractal dimensions D were extracted.
The fractal dimension smoothly decreased from its elastic value when the
plasticity of material was increased (that is, the yield stress
y
was decreased).
For a conning force of 50 Newtons, we found D
el
2.50 for elastic sheets,
and D
pl
2.37, D
pl
2.20 and D
pl
2.11 for elasto-plastic sheets with the
yield points
y
/Y = 0.05, 0.01 and 0.002, respectively (see Fig. 7a and Fig.
5 in the main article). For compressing forces of 25 N and 100 N we found
D
pl
2.21 and D
pl
2.24 (
y
/Y = 0.01), and D
el
2.45 and D
el
2.56,
respectively (see Fig. 7b). A slight increase in D for increasing force may
arise from the high volume fractions of the nal congurations. For a very
high force the sheet would ll the entire compressing shell and the result
would be close to D = 3. Examples of ridge patterns at the nal radius are
shown in Fig. 8.
9
10 20 30 40 60 80100
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
16
18
L [mm]
R
[
m
m
]


10 20 30 40 60 80100
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
16
18
L [mm]
R

[
m
m
]


Elastic 25N
Elastopl. 25N
Elastic 100N
Elastopl. 100N
L
2/2.45
L
2/2.22
L
2/2.56
L
2/2.24

y
/Y = 0.002

y
/Y = 0.05
L
2/2.11
L
2/2.37
a b
Figure 7: Relation between the sheet width and the radius at a
xed force of the crumpled conguration. a, The nal radius (R) as a
function of the sheet width (L) for fully elastic sheets (blue) and for elasto-
plastic sheets (red) at total conning forces of 25 N (open symbols) and 100
N (solid symbols). For elastic sheets at 25 N, R L
2/D
el25
with a fractal
dimension of D
el25
2.45. For elastic sheets at 100 N, and for elasto-plastic
sheets at 25 N and 100 N, the fractal dimensions D
el100
2.56, D
pl25
2.22
and D
pl100
2.24 were found. The yield point of the elasto-plastic sheets in
a is 1% of the Youngs modulus (
y
/Y = 0.01). In b R(L) for elasto-plastic
sheets of materials with a high and low yield point is shown. For weakly
plastic sheets (
y
/Y = 0.05) D
pl
2.37 was found and for very plastic
sheets (
y
/Y = 0.002) D
pl
2.11. In a and b the physical thickness of the
sheets was h = 0.1 mm and the Youngs modulus was Y = 1 GPa. The plots
are averages of three simulations.
10
Figure 8: Ridge patterns of elastic and elasto-plastic sheets crum-
pled by the same force. a, b, c and d show the mean curvature eld of
a crumpled fully elastic sheet, and crumpled elasto-plastic sheets with yield
points at 5%, 1% and 0.2% of the Youngs modulus, respectively. All sheets
have the thickness 0.1 mm, width 80 mm and Youngs modulus 1 GPa. The
conning force was 100 N in all cases.
11