Buckling of Naturally Curved Elastic Strips: The Ribbon Model Makes a Difference

We analyze the stability of naturally curved, inextensible elastic ribbons. In experiments, we first show that a loop formed using a metallic strip can become unstable if its radius is larger than its natural radius of curvature (undercurved case): the loop then folds onto itself into a smaller, multiply-covered loop. Conversely, a multi-covered, overcurved metallic strip can unfold dynamically into a circular configuration having a lower covering index. We analyze these instabilities using a one-dimensional mechanical model for an elastic ribbon introduced recently (Dias and Audoly in J. Elast., 2014), which extends Sadowsky’s developable elastic ribbon model in the presence of natural curvature. Combining linear stability analyses and numerical computations of the post-buckled configurations, we classify the equilibria of the ribbon as a function of the ratio of its natural curvature to its actual curvature. Our ribbon model is formulated in close analogy with classical rod models; this allows us to adapt classical stability methods for rods to the case of a ribbon. The stability of a ribbon is found to differ significantly from that of an anisotropic rod: we attribute this difference to the fact that the tangent twisting modulus of a ribbon can be negative, in contrast to what is possible in the well-studied case of linearly elastic rods. The specific stability properties predicted by the curved ribbon model are confirmed by a finite element analysis of cylindrical shells having a small height-to-radius ratio.