Whirling skirts and rotating cones

Steady, dihedrally symmetric patterns with sharp peaks may be observed on a spinning skirt, lagging behind the material flow of the fabric. These qualitative features are captured with a minimal model of traveling waves on an inextensible, flexible, generalized-conical sheet rotating about a fixed axis. Conservation laws are used to reduce the dynamics to a quadrature describing a particle in a three-parameter family of potentials. One parameter is associated with the stress in the sheet, another is the Noether current associated with rotational invariance and the third is a Rossby number which indicates the relative strength of Coriolis forces. Solutions are quantized by enforcing a topology appropriate to a skirt and a particular choice of dihedral symmetry. A perturbative analysis of nearly axisymmetric cones shows that Coriolis effects are essential in establishing skirt-like solutions. Fully nonlinear solutions with three-fold symmetry are presented which bear a suggestive resemblance to the observed patterns. Content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI. New Journal of Physics 15 (2013) 113055 1367-2630/13/113055+14$33.00 © IOP Publishing Ltd and Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft