Deployable Prismatic Structures With Rigid Origami Patterns

Abstract

Rigid origami inspires new design technology in deployable structures with large deployable ratio due to the property of flat foldability. In this paper, we present a general kinematic model of rigid origami pattern and obtain a family of deployable prismatic structures. Basically, a fourcrease vertex rigid origami pattern can be presented as a spherical 4R linkage, and the multivertex patterns are the assemblies of spherical linkages. Thus, this prismatic origami structure is modeled as a closed loop of spherical 4R linkages, which includes all the possible prismatic deployable structures consisting of quadrilateral facets and fourcrease vertices. By solving the compatibility of the kinematic model, a new group of 2nsided deployable prismatic structures with plane symmetric intersections is derived with multilayer, straight and curvy variations. The general design method for the 2nsided multilayer deployable prismatic structures is proposed. All the deployable structures constructed with this method have single degreeoffreedom (DOF), can be deployed and folded without stretching or twisting the facets, and have the compactly flatfolded configuration, which makes it to have great potential in engineering applications.