Deployable Prismatic Structures With Origami Patterns

Abstract

In order to find the general condition of the rigid origami pattern for the deployable prismatic structures, the kinematic model is proposed based on the mobile assemblies of spherical 4R linkages. The kinematic and geometric compatibility conditions of the mobile assemblies are derived. Two groups of 2n-side deployable prismatic structures are obtained. When n=2, one of them is with kite-shape intersection, while the other is with parallelgram. The variations of the unit are discussed. The straight and curvy multilayer prisms are built by changing the dihedral angles between the intersecting planes. The general design method for the 2n-side multilayer deployable prismatic structures is proposed with the geometric condition of the origami patterns. All the deployable structures constructed with this method can be deployed and folded along the central axis of the prisms with single degree of freedom, which makes the structures have wide engineering applications.