Las agrupaciones flexibles, reflexión crítica desde la experiencia

Abstract

Crumpled paper or drapery patterns are everyday examples of how elastic sheets can respond to external forcing. In this Letter, we study experimentally a different sort of forcing. We consider a circular flexible plate clamped at its center and subject to a uniform flow normal to its initial surface. As the flow velocity is gradually increased, the plate exhibits a rich variety of bending deformations: from a cylindrical shape, to isometric developable cones with azimuthal periodicity two or three, to eventually a rolled-up period-three cone. We show that this sequence of flow-induced deformations can be qualitatively predicted by a linear analysis based on the balance between elastic energy and pressure force work.