Poking/pressurizing thin elastic sheets with sliding boundaries

Dear iMechanicians, I would like to share our recent work on the poking and bulging of elastic thin sheets that were inspired by the classical indentation test and bulge test. Under clamped boundaries, there have been well-established theories and well-controlled experiments in this field. The new mechanics ingredient we focused on is the sliding boundary; It has played an important role in mechanical tests of ultrathin sheets (such as 2D crystals whose edges are hardly fixed), particularly in softening the sheets' mechanical response and causing them to wrinkle (often in a finite, annulus region). This work is concerned with how the sheet-to-substrate friction determines the wrinkling extent and affects the mechanical response of wrinkled sheets under poking and bulging. We also discussed a strategy that in turn exploits the wrinkling to characterize the thin sheet elasticity. 

The publisher link is here; A copy of the manuscript is also available from ResearchGate. 

Thanks for your attention. 

Zhaohe