<p>A recently proposed metamaterial idea called the Morph pattern, that exhibits interesting rigid origami kinematics, is discussed. It is a periodic tessellated structure of degree-4 non-developable vertices with a particular choice of origami panel geometries, that lead to a multitude of topologically distinct configurations as the system undergoes rigid folding. These configurations, which we refer to as hybrid states, arise from the two characteristic modes that each Morph unit cell can exist in by virtue of the mountain/valley assignment of a degree-4 vertex. The geometry and the configuration path of the Morph unit cell can be described in terms of its parameter space consisting of two folding angles. The 2D Morph metamaterial is obtained by tessellating the individual Morph unit cells while satisfying the compatibility constraints on the folding angles between adjacent cells. It is shown that the configuration path of the Morph metamaterial is characterized by a kinematic bifurcation point from which multiple branches representing different sets of hybrid states arise. The bifurcation point corresponds to a point in the parameter space of the Morph pattern that represents a geometric configuration, where all the unit cells simultaneously reach the transition state between the two characteristic modes. At all other points in the parameter space, the two different modes of the unit cells exist in the metamaterial at the same time. The presence of contrasting unit cells leads to existence of negative and positive Poisson’s ratio regions in the metamaterial, that are also varying locally as well as globally. The interplay between the local and global kinematics results in folding mechanisms in which the hybrid states are either locked in their current modes or are transformable to other modes of the kinematic branches, leading to a reprogrammable morphing behavior of the system.</p>

An Origami Metamaterial With Reprogrammable Rigid Folding Kinematics

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IDETC-CIE/IDETC-CIE2021/volume/85369

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