Seminar: Poking and Wrinkling of Sheets and Shells

Industrial and Computational Mathematics Seminar

Dr Dominic Vella (Oxford)

Abstract:

Poking an object is a useful way of testing its properties in a range of everyday applications from cooking meat to inflating a bicycle tyre. It is also used  quantitatively in science to achieve the same thing. In this talk I will discuss what we can learn from poking pressurized elastic shells - a simple model of yeast cells. I will also show that poking can cause wrinkling and how the wrinkling pattern may be useful in its own right. This leads on to a more general discussion of wrinkling in systems with a large number  of wrinkles.