Crumpled Kirigami

When a thin sheet crush into a tight ball, we say that it is crumpled. Surprisingly, a 3D spherical crumple made out of a flimsy 2D sheet of paper is quite rigid, even if a large amount of the crumple's volume consists of air. Crumples consist of several complex long-range ( folds, bends, and ridges) and short-range (D-cones) structural features. Numerous studies have been conducted on different crumpled sheets under the assumption of the dominance of one or the other of these substructures.  In our work we study crumples made out of three materials: polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), polycarbonate (PC), and paper. We add cut patterns to the sheets before crumpling under the hypothesis that the change in topography will inhibit long-range structures from forming. Remarkably, our simple crushing experiment shows that the basic behavior is unaltered by the change in topography, strongly suggesting that long-range features are not dominant.