Crumpling

High school (ages 12+)
Thinking & Learning

Name:

Date:

Step 1 · Read the article

Open the article and read it at the level above. Then answer the questions below in your own words.

https://smallwhale.org/articles/crumpling

Write what each word means, using the article.

Do not copy the article. Write two things you learned, the way you would explain them to a friend.

Answers below are taken from the article’s stored facts, so they match what the student read.

1. What is the key engineering application?Design of automotive crumple zones for controlled energy absorption during collisions
2. Why does a crumpled sheet have ridges and valleys?The sheet bends into ridges and valleys because the material wants to stay flat but is forced to squeeze, so it creates sharp bends that let it fit into a smaller space.
3. How does crumpling help cars stay safe?Cars have crumple zones that are designed to bend and absorb energy when a crash happens, so the force on the people inside is less.

Plastic Deformation: Irreversible change in shape of a material under stress, resulting in permanent structural alteration.
Scaling Laws: Relationships describing how physical properties of an object change with its size or dimensions.
Universality: The concept that different physical systems can exhibit the same critical behavior or statistical properties near a phase transition.