Engineering by Cuts: How Kirigami Principle Enables Unique Mechanical Properties and Functionalities

Abstract

Kirigami, the ancient art of paper cutting, has evolved into a design and fabrication framework to engineer multi‐functional materials and structures at vastly different scales. By slit cutting with carefully designed geometries, desirable mechanical behaviors—such as accurate shape morphing, tunable auxetics, super‐stretchability, buckling, and multistability—can be imparted to otherwise inflexible sheet materials. In addition, the kirigami sheet provides a versatile platform for embedding different electronic and responsive components, opening up avenues for building the next generations of metamaterials, sensors, and soft robotics. These promising potentials of kirigami‐based engineering have inspired vigorous research activities over the past few years, generating many academic publications. Therefore, this review aims to provide insights into the recent advance in this vibrant field. In particular, this paper offers the first comprehensive survey of unique mechanical properties induced by kirigami cutting, their underlying physical principles, and their corresponding applications. The synergies between design methodologies, mechanics modeling, advanced fabrication, and material science will continue to mature this promising discipline.

Crumpled Kirigami

“…Kirigami can be designed to allow parts of a sheet to rotate, either within the plane of the sheet, or out of the plane of the sheet, creating auxetic or other uncommon global deformation modes. 19 In short, cuts allow new mechanisms of motion and energy storage that typically don't occur in an uncut cut sheet. There has been little exploration of how confinement would affect the unusual deformation mechanisms available in kirigami systems.…”

Phononic Bandgap Programming in Kirigami By Unique Mechanical Input Sequencing

“…Kirigami -the ancient art of paper cutting -has become a versatile engineering framework for designing and constructing multi-functional material systems. [17] Careful cutting can impart stretchability to thin sheet materials like metal alloys, graphene, [18] and electronics, [19] thus fostering new designs of flexible sensors, [20] robots, [21,22] and metamaterials. [23][24][25] In particular, a stretched kirigami sheet can buckle out-of-plane and exhibit multi-stability, [26][27][28] One can also use simple stretching to create and control periodicity to generate tunable wave propagation bandgaps.…”

Shearigami: Self‐Folding via Shear Deformation

“…Transforming the shape of mechanical systems is a timeless subject of engineering design. The recent decade has seen a surge of origami-and kirigami-based systems such as reconfigurable devices, [1][2][3][4][5] robots, [6][7][8][9][10] and metastructures [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] that are transformed from sheet materials utilizing the crease-induced folding methodology. However, originated from folded paper, origami and kirigami suppress all in-plane sheet deformation, which fundamentally limits the self-folding capability since all the folding-energy has to be stored in the narrow creases.…”