Crumpling seems like a rather ordinary phenomenon; most graduate students are probably not interested in the subject let alone focusing on it as a research project. Maybe this is why NTHU's research team on crumpling led by Professor T. M. Hong consists entirely of undergraduate students and one exchange, J. M. Sun from Beijing University. Recently however the team and their research have received world wide recognition with the publication of their findings in the journal Physical Review Letters.

It appears that the crumpling phenomenon is ubiquitous in nature, from folding nanoscale proteins, squeezed blood cells between tissues, crumpled up love letters in the waste basket, deformed vehicles at crash scenes, to the Earth's tectonic plates colliding. Youtube also displays human being's natural interest in crumpling. Online crumpling is connected with other key words like folding (one video challenges watchers to fold a piece of paper more than eight times) and wrinkling (the wrinkles of old age, human brain topography, Shar-Pei dog's skin, fingerprints and palm patterns).

The cover picture of Physical Review Letters was taken from a joint study shared by Professor Hong and Dr. Y. K. Hwu of Academica Sinica. Illumination for the tomography was done by the neighboring National Synchrotron Radiation Research Center. Professor Hong's team was responsible for developing the software necessary for the analysis. In the study, the team discovered localized orderly phase alterations ("phase of Warring States," a term jokingly coined by Prof. Hong) inside an aluminum ball with increasing crumpling force applied--a phenomenon similar to the lamellae phase change observed on lyotropic liquid crystals with increasing density. This analogy may explain why an 80% void exists in the aluminum ball regardless of how much pressure is applied on the crumpled ball.

"More work needs to be done in the future," said Professor Hong regarding the senior project team. "First of all, our crumpling study will begin to examine what happens to two aluminum sheets stapled together; the joining point serves as a constraint and the number of joints will serve as a parameter in the study as well, since the aluminum films exhibit certain plasticity under crumpling, much the same as rubber exhibiting plasticity after vulcanization in a pressurized environment. The analogy can be extended to include the collision of two different vehicles, where two vehicles appear to be joined into one in some points, like being "stapled together" and crumpled. The folding length and the crumpling area are expected to satisfy the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, because crumpling can be modeled the same way as heat distribution when a red-hot iron bar is inserted into water. And second, we would like to see how to reduce the air void when higher pressure is applied, knowing that 80% exists in paper when crumpled by bare hands. We would like to see what happens if we exert 250-atmosphere pressure. Will we see Newton's second law of thermal dynamics occur? Naturally, the Warring States Phase, referring to the period around 400 BC when China was "crumpled down" to the state of disjointed war lords, may eventually yield to the inexorable fate of being united under Emperor Qin Shi-Huang with sufficient pressure? The question is, will the unification process be gentle or violent?"

Finally, Professor Hong acknowledges the success of the project to Y. C. Lin and other Taiwanese students and Chinese exchange students alike. He also gave thanks to his colleagues Z. C. Shih, C. H. Lin, and Professor P. L. Chen of the National Central University, as well as C. T. Liao and Z. M. Tian of the Physics Department for their technical support. Dean Ku Huan-Chiu and former Dean Kwo "Ray" Nien also made significant contributions to the study. "Of course, the work could not have been done without the financial support from the National Science Counsel," said Professor Hong.