Bending and buckling of wet paper

Bending and buckling of wet paper

Bending and buckling of wet paper M. Lee, S. Kim, H-Y. Kim, and L. Mahadevan  Physics of Fluids  28, 042101, 2016.
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Abstract

Flat paper stained with water buckles and wrinkles as it swells and deforms out
of the original plane. Here we quantify the geometry and mechanics of a strip of
paper that swells when it imbibes water from a narrow capillary. Characterizing the
hygroexpansive nature of paper shows that thickness-wise swelling is much faster
than in-plane water imbibition, leading to a simple picture for the process by which
the strip of paper bends out of the plane. We model the out-of-plane deformation
using a quasi-static theory and show that our results are consistent with quantitative
experiments. C