We report a unique collapse mechanism by exploiting the negative stiffness observed in the folding of an origami solid, which consists of pressurized cells made by stacking origami sheets. Such a collapse mechanism is recoverable, since it only involves rigid folding of the origami sheets and it is programmable by pressure control and the custom design of the crease pattern. The collapse mechanism features many attractive characteristics for applications such as energy absorption. The reported results also suggest a new branch of origami study focused on its nonlinear mechanics associated with folding.

We introduce a framework of utilizing origami folding to redistribute the inclusions of a phononic structure to achieve significant phononic bandgap adaptation. Cylindrical inclusions are attached to the vertices of Miura-Ori sheet, whose one degree-of-freedom rigid-folding can enable fundamental reconfigurations in the underlying periodic architecture via switching between different Bravais lattice-types. Such reconfiguration can drastically change the wave propagation behavior in terms of bandgap and provide a scalable and practical means for broadband wave tailoring.

Wave propagation inside a host media with periodically distributed inclusions can exhibit bandgaps. While controlling acoustic wave propagation has large impact on many engineering applications, studies on broadband acoustic bandgap (ABG) adaptation is still outstanding. One of the important properties of periodic structure in ABG design is the lattice-type. It is possible that by reconfiguring the periodic architectures between different lattice-types with fundamentally distinct dispersion relations, we may achieve broadband wave propagation tuning. In this spirit, this research pioneers a new class of reconfigurable periodic structures called origami metastructures (OM) that can achieve ABG adaption via topology reconfiguration by rigid-folding. It is found that origami folding, which can enable significant and precise topology reconfigurations between distinct Bravais lattice-types in underlying periodic architecture, can bring about drastic changes in wave propagation behavior. Such versatile wave transmission control is demonstrated via numerical studies that couple wave propagation theory with origami folding kinematics. Further, we also exploit the novel ABG adaptation feature of OM to design structures that can exhibit unique tunable non-reciprocal behavior. Overall the broadband adaptable wave characteristics of the OM coupled with scale independent rigid-folding mechanism can bring on-demand wave tailoring to a new level.

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ChemInform is a weekly Abstracting Service, delivering concise information at a glance that was extracted from about 100 leading journals. To access a ChemInform Abstract of an article which was published elsewhere, please select a “Full Text” option. The original article is trackable via the “References” option.