The origami inspired design of polyhedral cells of truss core panel

Abstract

Truss core panel (TCP), inspired by origami engineering, is a novel lightweight structure with periodical pyramid truss core cells in regular plane tilling patterns. Such panels are increasingly seen in a range of application form civil infrastructure to vehicle components, and show same bending stiffness and better aspects in shear strength and in-plane compressive load than honeycomb panel The geometric structure of TCP can be easily adjusted by changing the shape of the cell, which in hence influence the panel properties. However, in general, the geometry structure of truss core cells in TCP is triangular pyramid or rectangular pyramid. In this paper, a novel design method for polyhedral cells in TCP based on origami are developed, which comprise expanding and shrinking operation (design strategy 1), independent cutting and single cutting operation (design strategy 2), and combined operations (design strategy 3). By varying the geometric patterns of deployed polyhedral truss core cells (PTCCs), all possible patterns based on geometrical considerations are devised, systematically devising four types of PTCCs. These pattern variations are ruled by two design parameters, similarity ratio (w) and cutting ratio (k). In addition, the critical values of these two parameters for triggering pattern transformation and theoretical criteria for feasible transition among the four types of PTCCs was determined.