Capillary rise in crumped-sheets of paper

In this work we report experiments on the capillary rise of water into crumpled paper, in order to understand how the controlled damage of a soft material, like paper (hand-crumpled paper sheets), improves their capabilities of liquid sorption. We have done a series of experiments where a different number of crumples (from zero up to fifty) were made on different rectangular paper pieces and we found that an increasing number of crumples enhances such a capability. Characteristic power laws for the front of elevation, h, versus the elapsed time to reach such height, t, are reported.