Kirigami Actuators

Abstract

Thin elastic sheets bend easily and, if they are patterned with cuts, can deform in sophisticated ways. Here we show that carefully tuning the location and arrangement of cuts within thin sheets enables the design of mechanical actuators that scale down to atomically-thin 2D materials. We first show that by understanding the mechanics of a single, non-propagating crack in a sheet we can generate four fundamental forms of linear actuation: roll, pitch, yaw, and lift. Our analytical model shows that these deformations are only weakly dependent on thickness, which we confirm with experiments at centimeter scale objects and molecular dynamics simulations of graphene and MoS${}_2$ nanoscale sheets. We show how the interactions between non-propagating cracks can enable either lift or rotation, and we use a combination of experiments, theory, continuum computational analysis, and molecular dynamics simulations to provide mechanistic insights into the geometric and topological design of kirigami actuators.

Soft Matter, 2017

References in corpus (13)

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Cited by in corpus (22)

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• Automatic Design of Mechanical Metamaterial Actuators
• Multistable Kirigami for Tunable Architected Materials
• Forward and Inverse Design of Kirigami via Supervised Autoencoder
• Programming stiff inflatable shells from planar patterned fabrics
• Continuum field theory for the deformations of planar kirigami
• Kirigami mechanics as stress relief by elastic charges
• Theorem on the Compatibility of Spherical Kirigami Tessellations
• Thermal buckling and symmetry breaking in thin ribbons under compression
• Nonlinear mechanics of thin frames
• Smart helical structures inspired by the pellicle of euglenids
• On Local Kirigami Mechanics I: Isometric Conical Solutions
• On local kirigami mechanics II: Stretchable creased solutions
• Direct 3D Printing of Soft Fluidic Actuators with Graded Porosity
• Continuity and discontinuity of kirigami's high-extensibility transition: a statistical-physics viewpoint
• Anomalous thermal expansion in Ising-like puckered sheets
• Vibrations and tunneling of strained nanoribbons at finite temperature
• Tailoring materials into kirigami robots
• Intrinsic Rippling Enhances Static Non-Reciprocity in Graphene Metamaterials