Applied/ACMS/absF22

ACMS Abstracts: Fall 2022

James Hanna (UN-Reno)

Title: A snapping singularity

Abstract: I will discuss our preliminary work (with A. Dehadrai) on the focusing of kinetic energy and the amplification of various quantities during the snapping motion of the free end of a string or chain. This brief but violent event, with its remarkably large spikes in velocity, acceleration, and tension, is an essentially unavoidable feature of flexible structure dynamics, induced by generic initial and boundary conditions. We are guided by an analytical solution for a geometrically singular limit that features a finite-time singularity in other quantities. Regularization of this singularity does not arise from discretization of the continuous string equations or, equivalently, from the physical discreteness of a chain. It is instead associated with a length scale arising from the geometry of the problem, which evolves according to an anomalously slow curvature scaling.