The buckling process of a typical buckliball. (The colors represent stress.) The buckling motion consists mainly of counter-clockwise rotation of the narrow triangular-like portions with local bending of the narrow ligaments, which result in the closing of the apertures and the decrease in diameter of the deformed buckliball.

From:
Sen Lin, Yi Min Xie, Qing Li, Xiaodong Huang & Shiwei Zhou (Centre for Innovative Structures and Materials, School of Civil, Environmental and Chemical Engineering, RMIT University, GPO Box 2476, Melbourne 3001, Australia),

“Buckling-induced retraction of spherical shells: a study on the shape of aperture”, Nature.com Scientific Reports Vol. 5, Article Number: 11309, DOI: 10.1038/srep11309, 22 June 2015

ABSTRACT: Buckling of soft matter is ubiquitous in nature and has attracted increasing interest recently. This paper studies the retractile behaviors of a spherical shell perforated by sophisticated apertures, attributed to the buckling-induced large deformation. The buckling patterns observed in experiments were reproduced in computational modeling by imposing velocity-controlled loads and eigenmode-affine geometric imperfection. It was found that the buckling behaviors were topologically sensitive with respect to the shape of dimple (aperture). The shell with rounded-square apertures had the maximal volume retraction ratio as well as the lowest energy consumption. An effective experimental procedure was established and the simulation results were validated in this study.

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