Folding of wires

With Norbert Stoop and Falk Wittel we studied the folding of a wire in a two dimensional cell as published in a paper in Physical Review Letters Vol.101, 094101 (2008).

For a comparison with an experiment see this movie . This work was commented in in the October 2008 issue of Physics Today .

Below we see a packing in three dimensions as published in a paper in Physical Review Letters Vol.106, 214102 (2\ 011) and commented in the June 2011 issue of Soft Matter World Newsletter .

Now we are studying the generalization to surfaces. See below a sphere that grows inside a confining cavity.