Snap-through buckling is a type of instability in which an elastic object rapidly jumps from one state to another. Such instabilities are familiar from everyday life: you have probably been soaked by an umbrella flipping upwards in high winds, while snap-through is harnessed to generate fast motions in applications ranging from soft robotics to artificial heart valves. In biology, snap-through has long been exploited to convert energy stored slowly into explosive movements: both the leaf of the Venus flytrap and the beak of the hummingbird snap-through to catch prey unawares.
Despite the ubiquity of snap-through in nature and engineering, how fast snap-through occurs (i.e. its dynamics) is generally not well understood, with many instances reported of delay phenomena in which snap-through occurs extremely slowly. A striking example is a children’s ‘jumping popper’ toy, which resembles a rubber spherical cap that can be turned inside-out. The inside-out shape remains stable while the cap is held at its edges, but leaving the popper on a surface causes it to snap back to its natural shape and leap upwards. The snap back is not immediate: a time delay is observed during which the popper moves very slowly before rapidly accelerating.
The delay can be several tens of seconds in duration — much slower than the millisecond or so that would be expected for an elastic instability. Playing around further reveals other unusual features: holding the popper toy for longer before placing it down generally causes a slower snap-back, and the amount of delay is highly unpredictable, varying greatly with each attempt.
See more videos: Episode two: how fast the popper toy snaps, and how its unpredictable nature can arise purely from the mathematical structure of the snap-through transition.