Discrete Symmetries Control Mechanical Response in Parallelogram-based Origami


Abstract in English

Geometric compatibility constraints dictate the mechanical response of soft systems that can be utilized for the design of mechanical metamaterials such as the negative Poisson ratio Miura-ori origami crease pattern. We examine the broad family of crease patterns composed of unit cells with four generic parallelogram faces, expanding upon the family of Morph patterns, and characterize the familys low-energy modes via a permutation symmetry between vertices. We map these modes to the resulting strains and curvatures at the intercellular level where the same symmetries elucidate a geometric relationship between the strains of the systems rigid planar mode and the curvatures of its semi-rigid bend mode. Our formalism for the analysis of low-energy modes generalizes to arbitrary numbers of quadrilateral---not necessarily parallelogram---faces where symmetries may play an important role in the design of origami metamaterials.

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