Lifting a car with two phone books
- Date:
- January 8, 2016
- Source:
- Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS)
- Summary:
- Astonishingly, it turns out to be practically impossible to separate two interleaved phone books by pulling on their spines, however much force is applied. It is even possible to suspend a car from them.
- Share:
Astonishingly, it turns out to be practically impossible to separate two interleaved phone books by pulling on their spines, however much force is applied. It is even possible to suspend a car from them.
Using a model that reproduces the traction and friction forces involved, researchers at the Laboratoire de Physique des Solides (CNRS/Université Paris-Sud), Laboratoire Gulliver (CNRS/ESPCI ParisTech), Laboratoire de Génie des Procédés Papetiers (CNRS/Grenoble INP) and McMaster University in Canada have shown that when the spines of the interleaved phonebooks are pulled on vertically, part of the vertical force is converted into a horizontal force that presses on the sheets. The pages then remain stuck together due to friction.
The work, which began as a result of a challenge on the program "On n'est pas que des cobayes" on the France 5 TV channel, will be published in 7 January 2016 in the journal Physical Review Letters, and is already available on ArXiv (http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.03290).
Story Source:
Materials provided by Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Journal Reference:
- Héctor Alarcón, Thomas Salez, Christophe Poulard, Jean-Francis Bloch, Élie Raphaël, Kari Dalnoki-Veress, and Frédéric Restagno. Self-Amplification of Solid Friction in Interleaved Assemblies. Phys. Rev. Lett., Published 7 January 2016 DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.015502
Cite This Page: