Applying pressure to paper

[tutrakan4e]

What will happen if we take a normal sheet of paper and apply a ocuple of thousand giganewtos pressure to it? Will it catch on fire? Will it get thinner? I'm not scientist and this idea has been bugging me for quite some time now, so please post your ideas!

[Halsfury]

depends on how you apply it I'd say

if it is applied via discarding-sabot tungsten shell then it would just tear itself into confetti

at 4:13 in this video you can get an idea of how paper fragments during high speed impacts

If the bullet were going fast enough maybe it might cause the paper fragments to catch fire too.

If you mean to apply this pressure by slapping it onto a spacecraft's heatsheild then it would just vaporize like anything else

[Tex]

Dispersion, dispersion, dispersion.

What happens to the paper depends on how widely spread the force is. Drive a bullet at a few giganewtons through the paper, and it'll leave a nice little hole. If you spread the force to the entire size of the paper, or even larger... That's where it's left to the imagination, in my opinion.

[Seret]

Probably better to say a few uberpascals...

Paper is a fibrous composite. If we assume it's basically isotropic then what will happen first that it will expand laterally. The fibres that form it will begin to slide over each other and become aligned. Eventually you'll get to the point where the fibres are as flat as they can get, at which point you're dealing with chemical bonds instead of mechanical forces opposing further movement. At that point I'll pass the torch on to someone else...

Assuming you're squeezing it in a big press any heat that gets generated won't have access to oxygen, so it won't burn. Maybe somebody else would like to take a guess at what chemical reaction you get with cellulose and heat in an anaerobic situation?

Edited April 29, 2014 by Seret

[Yasmy]

Now from the department of nitpicking without answering the question:

1) a thousand gigawhatevers is a terawhatever: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix

2) pressure is force per unit area. for example, a Pascal is a Newton per square meter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_(unit).

If you apply the same force over a larger area, the pressure is lower.

For kicks, perhaps you should submit your question to xkcd - what if?