A Review of Thickness-Accommodation Techniques in Origami-Inspired Engineering

Abstract

Origami has served as the inspiration for a number of engineered systems. In most cases, they require nonpaper materials where material thickness is non-negligible. Foldable mechanisms based on origami-like forms present special challenges for preserving kinematics and assuring non-self-intersection when the thickness of the panels must be accommodated. Several design approaches for constructing thick origami mechanisms by beginning with a zero-thickness origami pattern and transforming it into a rigidly foldable mechanism with thick panels are reviewed. The review includes existing approaches and introduces new hybrid approaches. The approaches are compared and contrasted and their manufacturability analyzed.

Bioinspired dual-stiffness origami

“…In other words, the origami has a dual-stiffness behavior that conveniently merges the features of rigid and soft systems: load bearing in the stiff state and resilience and safe interaction in the soft state. Moreover, the membrane stretches during folding and stores elastic energy that can be used to rapidly deploy the compliant origami, and it can intrinsically accommodate the thickness of the tiles in folded state without resorting to dedicated methods that increase design and manufacturing complexity (16,32). For a given geometry of the fold and material of the membrane, the behavior of the dual-stiffness origami depends on two parameters.…”

Miura-ori enabled stretchable circuit boards

“…1c), respectively, where symbols with subscripts max and min are the corresponding maximum and minimum dimensions. Some engineering considerations like residual deformation 32,33 , sheet thickness [34][35][36] , and external forces 36 reduce the range of the folding degree φ in a Miura-ori design (Fig. 2c).…”

“…• Ideal folding range (RANGE I): For an ideal Miura-ori structure with negligible sheet thickness and bending radius, the maximum and minimum in-plane dimensions are taken to be those in the flat-folded state 36 and fully unfolded state, respectively.…”

Making Light Work of Metal Bending: Laser Forming in Rapid Prototyping

“…These algorithms are not limited to paper, although the algorithms typically neglect the effect of substrate thickness and, thus, work best on materials that are thin and inextensible, like paper. Oftentimes, the desired structures need to be made of materials that have a non-negligible thickness [7,8]. Folding rigid materials is typically done by attaching rigid facets with compliant hinges [9], but this places restrictions on what can be produced, a term called rigid foldability [10].…”