Bending and buckling of wet paper

Abstract

Flat paper stained with water buckles and wrinkles as it swells and deforms out of the original plane. Here we quantify the geometry and mechanics of a strip of paper that swells when it imbibes water from a narrow capillary. Characterizing the hygroexpansive nature of paper shows that thickness-wise swelling is much faster than in-plane water imbibition, leading to a simple picture for the process by which the strip of paper bends out of the plane. We model the out-of-plane deformation using a quasi-static theory and show that our results are consistent with quantitative experiments.