Seminar: Origami: Bringing Art into the Mechanical Design Fold

Origami, the art of Japanese paper folding, is being transformed from an ancient art to a rigorous field of study accompanied by significant advances in mathematics, computer science, and engineering physics. Origami as a means for material design with control of shape, energy, and multiphysics properties naturally lends itself to a variety of scientific and engineering applications including energy absorbing materials, space deployable structures, electromagnetic devices, and tunable acoustic transducers. While numerous efforts have focused on rigid origami (facets and fold lines undergoing rigid body motions), our work incorporates the effects of deformability and a topology optimization framework to efficiently explore the complex origami design space to realize mechanics-based objectives accounting for energy storage and/or closure under a given load. This presentation will focus on a recently developed nonlinear mechanics model accurately capturing the geometric nonlinearities associated with large fold line rotations/motions and its integration with our topology optimization framework. The utility of the nonlinear implementation is demonstrated on the analysis of a snap-thru bifurcation of the “water-bomb” fold and through the prediction of the square twist pattern, which possesses a sequenced folding motion. Collectively, these design tools are leading toward novel utilization of origami in adaptive and multifunctional engineering devices.

About the Speaker

Dr. Andrew Gillman is a Postdoctoral Research Scientist in the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Materials and Manufacturing Directorate and a member of the Origami Research Team. He obtained his PhD in Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering from the University of Notre Dame in 2016 after obtaining a BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University and Notre Dame, respectively. He has authored 7 peer-reviewed articles, with a 2015 article featured on the cover of Proceedings of the Royal Society A. His areas of expertise include computational mechanics, homogenization theories for predicting effective materials of heterogeneous materials, mathematical optimization, and image-based modeling of microstructures with particular focus on the development of high performance computing research software for deployment on today’s supercomputers.

Hosted by Professor Ryan Harne