Solitary waves in longitudinally wrinkled and creased helicoids

Elastic ribbons subjected to twist and stretch handle multiple morphological instabilities, amongst others, the longitudinally wrinkled and creased helicoids are investigated in the present paper as promising periodic nonlinear waveguides. Modeling the ribbon by isogeometric Kirchhoff-Love shells, the first longitudinal buckling mode is recovered numerically and used into the Bloch-Floquet method to obtain dispersion curves. After analyzing the effects of the buckling pattern on the different wavemodes, it is shown that classical linear axial waves interact with bending ones and become dispersive. Additionally, as buckling involves geometrical nonlinearities, the structure is expected to host stable nonlinear waves. Indeed, clear supersonic rarefaction trains are observed experimentally and their characteristics are found in agreement with the weakly nonlinear Boussinesq model.