Engineers at EPFL and École Polytechnique in France analyzed the friction between pages in a book and the mechanical force needed to bend them. Drawing on their experiments, they developed a new theoretical model for predicting the elasto-frictional behavior of stacked layers.
It all started with a shaky washing machine. Pedro Reis, head of the Flexible Structures Laboratory at EPFL’s School of Engineering, rolled up a piece of fabric and placed it under the machine to stop it from moving. After he saw how well the rolled-up fabric worked as a vibration damper, he got to thinking. He spoke with Samuel Poincloux, a postdoc at his lab, about his idea and they soon realized that the physics behind a piece of rolled-up material undergoing deformation is actually quite non-trivial. They set out to model the process, but given all the different variables involved, they decided to first simplify the problem. Instead of using rolled-up fabric, they started with a layered object possessing a similar geometry: a book. “For our experiments, we used flexible plastic sheets that we stacked up like the pages in a book, so that we could adjust and measure their collective properties,” says Poincloux.
Source: “Modeling the friction between pages in a book”, EPFL News
