Bistable Behavior of the Cylindrical Origami Structure With Kresling Pattern

Abstract

The deployment of a cylinder based on origami with Kresling pattern, whose basic mechanisms are formed by the buckling of a thin cylindrical shell under torsional loading, is studied in this paper. The model consists of identical triangular panels with cyclic symmetry and has a small displacement internal inextensional mechanism. First, geometric formulation of the design problem is presented. Then, assuming that the deployment and folding process is uniform, the bistable behavior of the cylinder is discussed. It can be found that, during the deployment, the dimensionless strain energy increases first and then reduces to zero but followed by another sharp increase. Moreover, the limit condition of geometry parameters for the bistable phenomenon is also discussed. Finally, the bistable behavior is also studied by using numerical simulations for simple and more complex case of the cylinder with multistory. The numerical results agree well with the analytical predictions. Therefore, comparisons with finite element predictions have shown that the analytical solutions given in this paper are accurate and have validated the assumptions made in the derivations.