CAREER: Large, Deployable and Adaptable Structures Through Origami Engineering

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This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant will explore origami engineering to enable large-scale civil engineering structures that move and reconfigure efficiently, predictably, and safely. This research will enable motion and reconfiguration of a civil structure with a minimal amount of force. The origami engineering principles will be used to generate traditional structures and architectures (e.g. beams, columns, surfaces), but with unique properties for reconfiguration and adaptability. These large-scale deployable and adaptable structures will result in fundamental improvements for construction methods, building operations, re-use of structures and adaptivity of infrastructure. The fundamental concepts will also allow innovations in space structures, robotics, biomedical devices, metamaterials, and more. The educational efforts of this program will establish Do-It-Yourself (DIY) learning to teach technical content and encourage engineering interest by engaging participants to make and explore their own origami structures. The project will actively engage high-school students in a low-income Detroit neighborhood, undergraduate researchers, graduate students, and children of different age groups. The goals of the project are to understand the mechanics of origami engineering with low to zero stiffness, and the fundamental research necessary to realize origami engineering principles in civil engineering structures. The research objectives are to: (1) establish a mechanics-based analytical framework that combines internal stress, body forces, elastic deformations, dynamics, and other behaviors to enable simulation of the novel origami; (2) explore the relationships between geometry, pre-stress, counter-balances and the desired low/zero stiffness characteristics, and formulate an optimization approach to tailor these properties; (3) identify origami geometries for functional applications in engineering and architecture. Through collaboration with practicing architects, these geometries will be optimized and systematically explored for realistic loading scenarios; and (4) fabricate, instrument, and experimentally test the new origami structures, and explore practical issues related to large-scale implementations. The overarching focus will be to harness low to zero stiffness characteristics in order to enable efficient and stable actuation for large structures. This project will advance the field of origami-inspired deployable and reconfigurable systems and contribute to making them feasible for civil engineering and architectural applications.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.