Kirigami-inspired inflatables with programmable shapes

Abstract

Kirigami, the Japanese art of paper cutting, has recently enabled the design of stretchable mechanical metamaterials that can be easily realized by embedding arrays of periodic cuts into an elastic sheet. Here, we exploit kirigami principles to design inflatables that can mimic target shapes upon pressurization. Our system comprises a kirigami sheet embedded into an unstructured elastomeric membrane. First, we show that the inflated shape can be controlled by tuning the geometric parameters of the kirigami pattern. Then, by applying a simple optimization algorithm, we identify the best parameters that enable the kirigami inflatables to transform into a family of target shapes at a given pressure. Furthermore, thanks to the tessellated nature of the kirigami, we show that we can selectively manipulate the parameters of the single units to allow the reproduction of features at different scales and ultimately enable a more accurate mimicking of the target.

15 pages, 4 figures

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Cited by in corpus (13)

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• Emergent Disorder and Mechanical Memory in Periodic Metamaterials
• Theorem on the Compatibility of Spherical Kirigami Tessellations
• Soft mechanical metamaterials with transformable topology protected by stress caching
• Strain compatibility and gradient elasticity in morphing origami metamaterials
• Effective continuum models for the buckling of non-periodic architected sheets that display quasi-mechanism behaviors
• Wang tiles enable combinatorial design and robot-assisted manufacturing of modular mechanical metamaterials
• Magnetic Dynamic Polymers for Modular Assembling and Reconfigurable Morphing Architectures
• Tailoring asymmetry for anisotropic friction in kirigami metamaterial skins with pop-up folding hinges
• Tailoring materials into kirigami robots
• 2D-to-3D transformation of ring origami via snap-folding instabilities
• Theorem for the design of deployable kirigami tessellations with different topologies
• Architected kirigami metamorphosis