English

Helical Miura Origami

Soft Condensed Matter 2020-03-18 v6

Abstract

We characterize the phase-space of all Helical Miura Origami. These structures are obtained by taking a partially folded Miura parallelogram as the unit cell, applying a generic helical or rod group to the cell, and characterizing all the parameters that lead to a globally compatible origami structure. When such compatibility is achieved, the result is cylindrical-type origami that can be manufactured from a suitably designed flat tessellation and "rolled-up" by a rigidly foldable motion into a cylinder. We find that the closed Helical Miura Origami are generically rigid to deformations that preserve cylindrical symmetry, but multistable. We are inspired by the ways atomic structures deform [1] to develop two broad strategies for reconfigurability: motion by slip, which involves relaxing the closure condition; and motion by phase transformation, which exploits multistability. Taken together, these results provide a comprehensive description of the phase-space of cylindrical origami, as well as quantitative design guidance for their use as actuators or metamaterials that exploit twist, axial extension, radial expansion, and symmetry.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1902.05123,
  title  = {Helical Miura Origami},
  author = {Fan Feng and Paul Plucinsky and Richard D. James},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1902.05123},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

12 pages, 7 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T07:40:24.377Z