Energy Landscape and Stability of Origami-Inspired Deployable Structures

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Scientists, mathematicians, and engineers are leading a vigorous interest to transform origami from the art of paper folding to innovative engineering design for harnessing its unique properties to create deployable structures with tunable properties. To fully harness origami's exemplar capabilities in deployment, there are two fundamental mechanics problems that need to be thoroughly studied, namely, deformation and stability of deployed origami structures. In this regard, this award supports fundamental research to investigate the energy landscapes of origami structures and to study the stability of the deformable origami structures. Successful investigations of the above problems will bring origami to be used in much broader applications, ranging from deployable structures for aerospace and civil applications, implantable medical devices, daily essentials, and toys. As a result, this research will promote the progress of the science and engineering of origami, and advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare. In addition to the research activities, the education and outreach programs aim to benefit a broad range of groups, from K-12 students through partnership with the local school district and science center and undergraduates through a university research initiative to graduate students through advanced teaching and research.Deployability has been one of the main motivations to study origami structures. There are some efforts to understand the mechanisms for the deploying process using paper folding as inspiration. However, the stability of the deployed structure has not been studied yet and, as reported in the literature, a deployed origami structure can potentially collapse along the deploying path. This research attempts to fill this gap by studying the stability of deformable origami structures. Specifically, it will focus on the idea that deploying and collapsing processes should take two different paths. A versatile and robust finite element platform will be developed to study the energy landscape of deformable origami patterns and investigate various stability phenomena of origami structures, including: bistable, multi-stable, and tunable multi-stable states. The platform and knowledge gained from the energy landscape/stability study will also be used to create new origami-inspired metamaterials with tunable deployability and collapsibility through heterogeneous integration of various origami structures, ranging from 1D tubular structures, 2D plates, and 3D structures.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.