Heterogeneous origami-architected materials with variable stiffness

Abstract

Origami, the ancient art of paper folding, has shown its potential as a versatile platform to design various reconfigurable structures. The designs of most origami-inspired architected materials rely on a periodic arrangement of identical unit cells repeated throughout the whole system. It is challenging to alter the arrangement once the design is fixed, which may limit the reconfigurable nature of origami-based structures. Inspired by phase transformations in natural materials, here we study origami tessellations that can transform between homogeneous configurations and highly heterogeneous configurations composed of different phases of origami unit cells. We find that extremely localized and reprogrammable heterogeneity can be achieved in our origami tessellation, which enables the control of mechanical stiffness and in-situ tunable locking behavior. To analyze this high reconfigurability and variable stiffness systematically, we employ Shannon information entropy. Our design and analysis strategy can pave the way for designing new types of transformable mechanical devices.

Multistability, symmetry and geometric conservation in eightfold waterbomb origami

“…However, the preceding discussion serves as a coarse approximation to designing a waterbomb tessellation with targeted mechanical properties. Related work that uses origami to achieve programmable stiffness includes Zhai et al [25] via curved crease origami, Wen et al [27] and Miyazawa et al [26] via stacked and cellular origami. In flat foldable, quadrilateral origami, it has been shown that the prescribing fold angles at the boundary uniquely determines the kinematics of the entire sheet [34,35].…”

“…Origami has emerged as an important platform in science and engineering for applications across a diverse array of length scales: from large-scale aerospace applications [1,2] to smallerscale biomedical applications [3,4]. In particular, the multistability properties of origami have proven useful for the design of deployable structures that are stable in both their compact and deployed configurations [5,6], driving locomotion in origami-based robotics [7][8][9][10], storing mechanical energy [11] and information [12][13][14], and for origami-based mechanical metamaterials [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27].…”

Triclinic Metamaterials by Tristable Origami with Reprogrammable Frustration

“…Due to its rich design space, origami structures have been a major source of inspiration for creating metamaterial microstructures with various symmetry types. [23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30] In the literature, some tubular origami-based metamaterials have been created to achieve triclinic symmetry. [31] However, the disadvantage of tubular designs is that their unit cell geometry and configuration space are typically intricate, involving several parameters.…”

“…The triclinic symmetry describes a periodic system whose primitive vectors are of unequal length, and the angles between these vectors are all different and may not even include 90 • . Due to its rich design space, origami structures have been a major source of inspiration for creating metamaterial microstructures with various symmetry types [23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30]. In the literature, some tubular origami-based metamaterials have been created to achieve triclinic symmetry [31].…”

Extreme Specific Stiffness Through Interactive Cellular Networks in Bi‐Level Micro‐Topology Architected Metamaterials

“…The unit cell-based approach to analyzing periodic lattices has been widely adopted in the literature. [8][9][10][11][12] These materials have tunable mechanical properties as the global-level physical behavior is not only dependent upon the intrinsic material, but the microstructural geometry of the periodic units also. The macro-scale lattice properties like Young's moduli, [13,14] Poisson's ratio, [15] and shear moduli [16] are largely dependent upon the geometric configurations of the periodic unit cells.…”