Session: 12-18-01: Functional Origami and Kirigami-inspired Structures and Metamaterials

Paper Number: 99301

99301 - Reconfigurability and Tunability of Mechanical Metamaterials Based on Tachi-Miura Polyhedron 

We investigate the reconfigurability and tunability of the tessellation of Tachi-Miura Polyhedron (TMP), an origami-based cellular structure. Lattice-based three-dimensional mechanical metamaterials have recently received significant scientific interest due to their superior and unique mechanical performance compared to conventional materials. While their unique properties propose to be leveraged in multiple fields such as mechanical, aerospace, and biomedical engineering, these metamaterials are scarce in terms of in-situ tunability and reconfigurability due to their fabrication method and intrinsic architectures. Also, such metamaterials are costly to manufacture due to their unit-cell-based architectures. On the other hand, origami, the art of paper folding, has provided mechanical metamaterials with the possibility to enhance their reconfigurability and tunability of the fabricated structure. Recently, a considerable amount of research has been performed to offer such characteristics. Particularly, the research interest has been focused on the realization of reconfigurable mechanical metamaterials with the concept of origami or equivalent architecture.

Here, to offer tunable nature to three-dimensional voluminous mechanical metamaterials, we adopt techniques of origami to build a space-filling tessellation. To this end, TMP can perform as an ideal platform to endow the mechanical metamaterials with reconfigurability and tunability. TMP is one of the origami-based mechanical metamaterials with bellows-like 3D unit cells constructed from 2D Miura-folding sheets. Mechanical metamaterials based on Miura-folding exhibit multiple features such as rigid foldability and auxeticity. Furthermore, we can manufacture voluminous TMP tessellations with load-bearing ability. By leveraging the ability to form a tessellation while keeping the rich tunability of mechanical properties, we report the tunable mechanical properties of the tessellation of the TMP unit cell both analytically and experimentally. Furthermore, inspired by the manufacturing of honeycomb structures, TMP tessellations can be constructed with long origami sheets. With this method, we can achieve efficient manufacturing of metamaterials compared to the unit-cell-based fabrication methods.

In this work, we aim at: (i) proposing a TMP tessellation as a mechanical platform that has an in-situ tunability of mechanical properties within the elastic deformation regime where we can easily analyze its design space; (ii) reporting a unique behavior where the stiffness decreases as the density increases; (iii) presenting anisotropic positive/negative Poisson’s ratios visualized with the density and stiffness in three-dimensional extended Ashby chart; and (iv) validating the analysis and visualization of the design space via experiments on the prototypes manufactured with the efficient method inspired by honeycomb structures. By combining origami-based tessellation design, and analytical method with rigid-origami modeling, efficient prototype manufacturing, and experimental verification, we show the effectiveness of the origami-mechanical metamaterials as a tunable mechanical platform that has a wide range of the stiffness, density, and Poisson’s ratio. Specifically, we find a change in stiffness by a factor of 60, density by a factor of 10, and specific stiffness by a factor of 700, approximately. Furthermore, such tunability is represented as an Ashby chart and compared to the conventional materials. These analyses and experiments discover the wide range of the in-situ tunability of the metamaterial after its fabrication within the elastic deformation regime and the unique behavior of the inverse correlation between density and stiffness. This mechanical platform paves the way to design the metamaterial that can actively adapt to the various outer environments.

Presenting Author: Koshiro Yamaguchi University of Washington

Presenting Author Biography: Koshiro Yamaguchi was born in Shizuoka, Japan. He earned his B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from Nihon University, Tokyo, Japan in 2018. In Fall 2018, he joined the Laboratory for Engineered Materials and Systems (LEMS), led by Professor Jinkyu Yang, at the University of Washington.

Authors:

Koshiro Yamaguchi University of Washington
Jinkyu Yang University of Washington