Multi-States Origami Morphing Structures

Origami is the traditional Japanese art of paper folding and is increasingly used in most engineering fields such as architecture and deployable mechanisms.Most existing origami-inspired engineering designs use either a bespoke crease pattern to form a single structure,or a universal crease pattern capable of forming numerous structures with multiple folding steps.In this thesis,particular attention is given to design new origami structures named after morphing origami,which can be folded into different shapes and realize transformation between overlapped states using same crease pattern.In the first part,a fundamentally new method was proposed to generate multiple one-DOF rigid-foldable configurations from pre-defined crease patterns.The method leverages the existing knowledge surrounding rigid-foldability to enable crease patterns of different one-DOF rigid-foldable states to be embedded within a single sheet.Kinematic behavior of cross-crease vertex,which consists of two pairs of collinear crease lines,is presented to show that it contains two discrete one-DOF rigid-foldable states.Result shows that the sheet can be folded following the kinematic route of either of the two merged patterns.The switching between two folding routes is achieved at the configuration when the sheet unfolds to a completely flat state.The second part of this thesis explores several engineering applications of superimposed rigid-foldable origami.It shows that the method that superimposed multiple kinematical-independent rigid-foldable crease patterns into one sheet explores the possibilities of generating multiple states with different or complementary functionality and thus has substantial potential for applications in origami-inspired engineering designs.Besides,the particular feature of continuous-folding superimposed origami patterns,which not only could two patterns be merged,the folding sequence is switchable,gives the possibilities to be used to construct programmable meta-materials.The final part of this thesis presented a method to count rigid-foldable M-V assignments for parallelogram twist pattern and a necessary condition for getting a rigidly foldable tessellation pattern.