Tessellated surface patterns impart structures with novel properties such as increased stiffness and tailored surface roughness. A significant challenge involved in utilizing such patterns is that a single repeat unit contains an assortment of faces and vertices, which must be accurately repeated to form the desired final shape. Two common approaches for producing tessellated structures are folding from a planar sheet and assembly of rigid components. Traditional folding of tessellated patterns from a two-dimensional (2D) sheet is time consuming, imprecise, and subject to compliant hinges after folding. A built-up tessellated structure requires a large number of parts, depends structurally on integral glue or fasteners, and is prone to propagating alignment errors which could significantly impact the final shape and mechanical properties. To address these challenges, we explore the use of self-folding shape memory polymer (SMP) sheets to consistently self-fold tessellated origami patterns. A line printed on the surface of the SMP will cause the sample to fold in that direction when heated by an infrared light. By coordinating patterns of lines on the top and bottom surface, simultaneous folding of mountain and valley folds can be accomplished. We use this approach to fabricate both Miura Ori and square twist folds with rigid hinges, without the need for direct manual assembly.


Fabrication of Tessellated Structures via Simultaneous Self-Folding

Division / Sponsors: 
Aerospace Division

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/SMASIS/SMASIS2020/volume/84027

SMASIS2020 - Virtual Conference

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.