Abstract
Insight into crumpling or compaction of one-dimensional objects is important for understanding biopolymer packaging and designing innovative technological devices. By compacting various types of wires in rigid confinements and characterizing the morphology of the resulting crumpled structures, here, we report how friction, plasticity and torsion enhance disorder, leading to a transition from coiled to folded morphologies. In the latter case, where folding dominates the crumpling process, we find that reducing the relative wire thickness counter-intuitively causes the maximum packing density to decrease. The segment size distribution gradually becomes more asymmetric during compaction, reflecting an increase of spatial correlations. We introduce a self-avoiding random walk model and verify that the cumulative injected wire length follows a universal dependence on segment size, allowing for the prediction of the efficiency of compaction as a function of material properties, container size and injection force.
Highlights
Insight into crumpling or compaction of one-dimensional objects is important for understanding biopolymer packaging and designing innovative technological devices
We study the morphologies of wires packed into rigid spherical containers and find that the maximum packing density in disordered structures decreases with reduced thickness of the wire
We propose that the compaction can be considered as a confined self-avoiding random walk (SAW)
Summary
The disorder is enhanced by friction, which causes the wire to resist against sliding and to randomly bend due to local constraints[20] Another property which obviously affects the morphology is the degree of plasticity of the wire. The morphological phase space contains additional degrees of freedom associated with container properties, such as its flexibility[20], shape[23] or the degree of confinement imposed by it (characterized by the container size R relative to the radius of gyration Rg of the crumpled structure and to the persistence length l of the elastic wire). For l values in between, the morphological evolution during the crumpling process is a
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