How is it that cloth or fabric can bend and ruffle easily? What happens to the cloth’s atomic structure that allows for such bending without permanent deformation? And why is that different for solid materials like metals?
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It’s not different for metals…if you “spin” metals out to really thin fibers you can happily make cloth out of it. Kind of stiff heavy cloth, but cloth none the less.
It’s not really anything to do with atomic structure, it’s to do with physical shape. Very thin fibers are very flexible. This is a fallout of how the stress of bending things works. Very thin shapes can bend a lot without causing too much stress in the material, they’re flexible and won’t break easily. Thick shapes are very stiff, it takes a lot of force to bend them and the large forces cause large stresses in the material, you’re likely to break it.
This is most obvious when you look at materials available in both fiber and block form, like nylon. Nylon fabric is made of thing fibers and very flexible. Nylon block is the same plastic but very stiff. It’s all about the form, not the chemistry/atomic structure.
Atomic structure does play into stiffness (this is why metal fabric isn’t as flexible as, say, cotton) but the bulk behavior is mostly driven by shape.
Metals (or any crystaline material) are also subject to fatigue…cracking from repeated bending. This can happen to organic fabric too, it just depends on the molecular makeup. Crystaline materials are really succeptable to this, long-chain molecules like polymers not so much.
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