No abstract

Many living beings show the ability and necessity to develop invertible, tubular structures to enable additional functions temporarily. The biological archetypes always demonstrate a high change of volume of the structure between an inactive and active state. This makes the principle interesting for many technical applications, where a certain geometry or an additional volume has to be generated situationally for a task and can only be accepted temporarily, for example, in minimally invasive robotics. A possibility was sought to transfer the archetype into the technical context and to evaluate geometric-constructive dependencies based on an inversion of the structure. The result is a practicable design for repeatedly invertible net structures, which can be used for products with temporary additional functions and volumes.

Foldable technical structures can be used to provide a temporary additional volume. In nature, a tubular folding application is the extension of the snail eye. The present study uses this approach. A transformation into a technical application is only successful if the high eversion loads are considered. The study aims to develop a method to realize such structures based on a metallic wire net structure. The tube consists of Shape Memory Alloy (SMA) pieces connected by developed crimp elements produced by additive manufacturing. Additive manufacturing was used to provide a fast and effective way to make several crimp element geometries available to define a preferred variant. In a preliminary building study, the printing parameters for crimp element production were improved. The tubular structure development is assisted by numerical simulation of the eversion process. The SMA material model parameters were identified with experimental tension tests. A feasible way to connect additively manufactured crimp elements with SMA wire was found within a joining method study. Tension tests of the connections protect against pull-out failure. The eversion process was investigated using a high-speed camera system. Multiple eversion of the developed structure is possible without failure.