Self-locking and stiffening deployable tubular structures

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Lee, Ting-Uei; Lu, Hongjia; Ma, Jiaming; San Ha, Ngoc; Gattas, Joseph M.; Xie, Yi Min
• 署名单位: Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT); University of Queensland
• 刊物名称: PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0027-15115
• DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2409062121
• 发表日期: 2024-10-01
• 关键词: origami

摘要

Deployable tubular structures, designed for functional expansion, serve a wide range of applications, from flexible pipes to stiff structural elements. These structures, which transform from compact states, are crucial for creating adaptive solutions across engineering and scientific fields. A significant barrier to advancing their performance is balancing expandability with stiffness. Using compliant materials, these structures achieve more flexible transformations than those possible with rigid mechanisms. However, they typically exhibit reduced stiffness when subjected to external pressures (e.g., tube wall loading). Here, we utilize origami-inspired techniques and internal stiffeners to meet conflicting performance requirements. A self-locking mechanism is proposed, which combines the folding behavior observed in curved-crease origami and elastic shell buckling. This mechanism employs simple shell components, including internal diaphragms that undergo pseudofolding in a confined boundary condition to enable geometrical interference, creating a braced tubular arrangement. This arrangement gives a direction-dependent structural performance, ranging from elastic response to point to drive technological advancement in real-world deployable tubular structures.