Paper detail

Computation of Unconstrained Elastic Equilibria of Complete Möbius Bands and their Stability

Determining the equilibrium configuration of an elastic Möbius band is a challenging problem. In recent years numerical results have been obtained by other investigators, employing first the Kirchhoff theory of rods and later the developable, ruled-surface model of Wunderlich. In particular, the strategy employed previously for the latter does not deliver an unconstrained equilibrium configuration for the complete strip. Here we present our own systematic approach to the same problem for each of these models, with the ultimate goal of assessing the stability of flip-symmetric configurations. The presence of pointwise constraints considerably complicates the latter step. We obtain the first stability results for the problem, numerically demonstrating that such equilibria render the total potential energy a local minimum. Along the way we introduce a novel regularization for the for the singular Wunderlich model that delivers unconstrained equilibria for the complete strip, which can then be tested for stability.