Modeling folding surfaces with nonzero thickness is of practical interest for mechanical engineering. There are many existing approaches that account for material thickness in folding applications. We propose a new systematic and broadly applicable algorithm to transform certain flat-foldable crease patterns into new crease patterns with similar folded structure but with a facet-separated folded state. We provide conditions on input crease patterns for the algorithm to produce a thickened crease pattern avoiding local self intersection, and provide bounds for the maximum thickness that the algorithm can produce for a given input. We demonstrate these results in parameterized numerical simulations and physical models.
@article{arxiv.1601.05747,
title = {Folding Flat Crease Patterns with Thick Materials},
author = {Jason S. Ku and Erik D. Demaine},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1601.05747},
year = {2016}
}