Origami-based tunable truss structures for non-volatile mechanical memory operation

Hiromi Yasuda,Jinkyu Yang,Mia Lee,Tomohiro Tachi

doi:10.1038/s41467-017-00670-w

Abstract

Origami has recently received significant interest from the scientific community as a method for designing building blocks to construct metamaterials. However, the primary focus has been placed on their kinematic applications by leveraging the compactness and auxeticity of planar origami platforms. Here, we present volumetric origami cells—specifically triangulated cylindrical origami (TCO)—with tunable stability and stiffness, and demonstrate their feasibility as non-volatile mechanical memory storage devices. We show that a pair of TCO cells can develop a double-well potential to store bit information. What makes this origami-based approach more appealing is the realization of two-bit mechanical memory, in which two pairs of TCO cells are interconnected and one pair acts as a control for the other pair. By assembling TCO-based truss structures, we experimentally verify the tunable nature of the TCO units and demonstrate the operation of purely mechanical one- and two-bit memory storage prototypes.

Highlights

Origami has recently received significant interest from the scientific community as a method for designing building blocks to construct metamaterials
Since the triangulated cylindrical origami (TCO) is not a rigid foldable origami, folding/unfolding motions cause the warping of each facet, which may result in surface fatigue and damage under repeated usage
Using this TCO-based truss structure as a unit cell, we further investigate the folding mechanism of multi-cell structures composed of serially stacked TCO cells

Summary

Introduction

Origami has recently received significant interest from the scientific community as a method for designing building blocks to construct metamaterials. We present volumetric origami cells— triangulated cylindrical origami (TCO)—with tunable stability and stiffness, and demonstrate their feasibility as non-volatile mechanical memory storage devices. Mechanical memory operations can be highly useful to mimic electronic/optical memory devices, and to store the flow of mechanical energy for sound isolation, heat insulation, and energy harvesting purposes[1,2,3,4,5]. A quadrangular mesh origami, e.g., Miura-ori pattern[18], has been studied extensively, because it offers a single degree of freedom (DOF) mechanism of folding without relying on the elasticity of materials This structure is called rigid (foldable) origami, and its 1-DOF motion can be beneficial for the control of deployable planar structures, such as solar panels and sails[19, 20] and sandwich core materials[21]. We demonstrate that the behavior of this TCO can be predicted analytically by modeling its deformable surfaces into a b b a c

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Results

Conclusion