The physics of frilly Swiss cheese “flowers”

For his or her experiments, the authors of the PRL paper chosen samples of Monk’s head cheese wheels from the Fromagerie de Bellelay model that had been aged between three and 6 months. They minimize every cheese wheel in half and mounted every half on a Girolle, motorizing the bottom to make sure a relentless pace of rotation and ensuring the blade was in a hard and fast place. Their measurements of how the cheese deformed throughout scraping enabled them to construct a mannequin based mostly on steel dynamics on a two-dimensional floor that had “cheese-like properties.”

The outcomes confirmed that there was a variable friction between the core and the sting of the cheese wheel, as a result of the core stayed more energizing in the course of the ripening course of. As a result of the more durable periphery had decrease friction with the blade, the sides of the cheese shavings had been uneven in thickness—therefore the resemblance to frilly rosettes.

This primarily quantities to a brand new shaping mechanism with the potential of having the ability to someday program advanced shaping from “a easy scraping course of,” per the authors. “Our evaluation supplies the instruments for a greater management of flower chip morphogenesis by way of plasticity within the shaping of different delicacies, but additionally in steel reducing,” they concluded. Granted, “flower-shaped chips have by no means been reported in steel reducing. However even in such uniform supplies, the truth that friction properties management the metric change is especially attention-grabbing for materials shaping.”

Bodily Overview Letters, 2025. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.134.208201  (About DOIs).