Session: DAC-11-01-Design of Engineering Materials and Structures

Paper Number: 90145

90145 - On Spiral Folding of Planar Membranes With Finite Thickness and Curved Creases 

Spiral folding of flat and planar membranes with finite thickness is of relevant interest to develop the spin-type deployable membrane structures for space environments and for consumer applications. Examples involve the design and development of origami-based structures, airbags, antenna design, wrapping of food by thin membranes, wheel design, and membrane deployment for medical applications. In this paper, we propose the governing equations to fold planar membranes with finite thickness by using curved creases, whose governing equations render fold patterns whose radius of curvature tends to increase linearly by accommodating membrane thickness. The consideration of curvature along in the crease patterns is relevant and potential to balance the tension of outer layers with the compression of inner layers, and to distribute the out-of plane and localized bending near the creases and vertices. We present the mathematical formulations that consider the curved creases and describe folding examples of a planar membrane with a defined thickness. Our computational experiments have shown (1) the versatility to model a plural number of curvature profiles, and (2) the feasibility of global deployment by using the compliant and explicit numerical simulations. From viewpoints of configuration and deployment performance, the curved crease patterns are potential to extend the versatility and smoothness of spiral folding mechanisms.

Presenting Author: Victor Parque Waseda University

Presenting Author Biography: Victor Parque is an Associate Professor at Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, and Visiting Professor at Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology (E-JUST) in Alexandria, Egypt. His research interests span the principles and applications of learning and intelligent systems in design engineering and robotics. He has been honored with several competitive research grants and is actively involved in collaboration with the industry. He was honored as a finalist in the Hummies Awards for Human-Competitive Results from the ACM Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference and the distinction of top 10% selected papers at the International Conference on Engineering Design. He is a Faculty Member of the Japanese Supporting University Consortium (JSUC). He is also a member of IEEE - Systems Man and Cybernetics Society (SMC), Robotics and Automation Society (RAS), Industrial Electronics Society (IES), the ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence (SIGAI), the ACM Special Interest Group on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (SIGEVO), and the Robotics Society of Japan (RSJ).

Authors:

Victor Parque Waseda University
Tomoyuki Miyashita Waseda University