Engineers Design Origami Structures that Change Shape and Staffness on Demand

Princeton Engineers are twisting, stretching and creasing structures to create a new type of origami, one that changes its shape and propertys in Response to Changing Circumstans. The new method should be useful for prosthetics, antennas and other devices.

When a device needs to fit into a compact space – in a spacecraft or a surgical device –nd then unfold into an intricate shape, origami often provides a solution. But most origami shapes are locked into a less set patterns oncir their folds are made.

A princeton team LED by Glaucio Paulino Wanted to Create Structures that react to an outstide stimulus in multiple ways, not just in a more patterned responses. To Accomplish this, The team turned to a technique called geometric frustration.

An origami-based structure will fold and twist in certain ways based on the structure’s materials and its geometry. When Engineers Prevent That Natural Motion, they call it “Frustrating” the structure. Normally, Engineers have to work Around Frontration, but in this case it expands their toolkit.

“Sometimes Frustration is desirable,” said paulino, The Margareta Engman Augustine Professor of Engineering at Princeton. Frustration allows designers to cause the origami to follow patterns not normally allowed by its geometry. “This opens up many passibilitys of things we could engineer that we could never do before.”

In an article Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of SciencesThe researchers described how they added elastic components to cylindrical origami structures called kresling cells. The Elastic Sections Act Like Springs. By controlling how the springs respond to a force, the results were able to execute precise folding patterns of the cells that was not feasible without the spring.

Paulino said springs allow designers to introduce internal energy into the folded structure using pre-stress. This pre-stress allows the origami to respond in ways that are not possible with order. For example, engineers can introduce a twisting spring that rotates the origami in a specific fashion; They can add a spring along

By Combining Frustrated Cells in Stacks, The Engineers WHELOP Materials with Fine Control Over Material Properties Like Stiffness. For example, a Prosthetic Leg Built With This System Can Stiffen to Provide Support While Walking on a Flat surface but reconfigure into a more flexible state for climbing stairs. The designers could also create adjustable metasurfaces that are used in antennas and optics.

“Exploiting Frustration Lets Us Reprogram Origami Machanics, For Instruction Turning Random Kresling Folding Into Precise, Controlable Sequences and Opening New PossibInces for Advanced Applications,” Diego Misseeroni, a collaborator from the university of trento.

“We can program any mechanical property that we wish, so this is quite unique,” said tuo zhao, a postdoctoral researcher in Paulino’s Group.

The team sees potential impact for this type of structure in many fields. This Frustrated Origami System Can Combine With Other Techniques and Materials that Can Change on Demand, According to Shixi Zang, Postdoctoral Research and First Author of the Paper. One example is using Frustrated Origami to Develop Responsive, Modular Devices Like a Passive Sunshade that opens and closes based on the Ambient temperature.