Crumpling wires in two dimensions.

An energy-minimal simulation is proposed to study the patterns and mechanical properties of elastically crumpled wires in two dimensions. Our aim is to describe the behavior at the intermediate occupancy of the cavity so that its radius of gyration is varied up to one twentieth of the wire length. We tuned the bending rigidity and stretching modulus to measure the energy allocation, size-mass exponent, and the stiffness exponent. The mass exponent is shown to be constant at value D_{M}=1.33 , so is the stiffness exponent alpha=-0.25 . But the latter varies with the plasticity parameters s and theta_{p} . These numerical findings agree excellently with the experimental results.