Prestrained ribbons

On decreasing the separation between the ends of a sandwiched ribbon, depending on the prestrain in the middle part of the ribbon, the ribbon buckles with single or multiple perversions. Perversions involve sharp changes of twist, and a ribbon state with multiple perversions is anticipated to be energetically costlier than the ribbon state with a single perversion. However, the multiple perversion ribbon states are exhibited in the experiments. A question arises: why do ribbons exhibit multi-perversion deformations if they are not energetically favorable?

We published a paper in JMPS presenting an asymptotically derived one-dimensional ribbon model to explain the single and multiple perversions phenomenon and its reason. To facilitate the reproducibility of model derivation and numerical results, we have made the derivation and Auto-7p code implementing the model available at this link.