Papers › Rods coiling about a rigid constraint: Helices and perversions
Rods coiling about a rigid constraint: Helices and perversions
Davide Riccobelli, Giovanni Noselli, Antonio DeSimone
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
Mechanical instabilities can be exploited to design innovative structures, able to change their shape in the presence of external stimuli. In this work, we derive a mathematical model of an elastic beam subjected to an axial force and constrained to smoothly slide along a rigid support, where the distance between the rod midline and the constraint is fixed and finite. Using both theoretical and computational techniques, we characterize the bifurcations of such a mechanical system, in which the axial force and the natural curvature of the beam are used as control parameters. We show that, in the presence of a straight support, the rod can deform into shapes exhibiting helices and perversions, namely transition zones connecting together two helices with opposite chirality. The mathematical predictions of the proposed model are also compared with some experiments, showing a good quantitative agreement. In particular, we find that the buckled configurations may exhibit multiple perversions and we propose a possible explanation for this phenomenon based on the energy landscape of the mechanical system.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections