Eur. Phys. J. E (2004) 13: 73-77
https://doi.org/10.1140/epje/e2004-00041-4

Deformation of adhering elastic tubes

Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, Tokyo Metropolitan University, 192-0397, Tokyo, Japan

^* e-mail: komura@comp.metro-u.ac.jp

Abstract

Deformation of an elastic tube adhering onto a substrate due to van der Waals attractive force is investigated by means of numerical minimization and scaling theory. The onset of the deformation is determined by the critical value of , where is the bending constant, is the depth of the van der Waals potential, and N is the size of the tube. For a significantly deformed tube, we found a scaling behavior of the bending energy, which is explained within the shell theory.