Folding of thin walled tubes as a free gradient discontinuity problem

The aim of this paper is to describe buckling deformations of hollow cylinders whose buckled configurations consist of inextensional deformations of their original middle surface, through minimization of two competing energy forms: a bulk elastic energy and an interface bending energy. These minimal energy configurations are obtained through descent minimization within the class of folding deformations. The non-standard problem of minimization over variable triangulations is considered