Liu, J.; Fan, X.; Wen, G.; Qing, Q.; Wang, H.; Zhao, G. A Novel Design Framework for Structures/Materials with Enhanced Mechanical Performance. Materials2018, 11, 576.
Liu, J.; Fan, X.; Wen, G.; Qing, Q.; Wang, H.; Zhao, G. A Novel Design Framework for Structures/Materials with Enhanced Mechanical Performance. Materials 2018, 11, 576.
Liu, J.; Fan, X.; Wen, G.; Qing, Q.; Wang, H.; Zhao, G. A Novel Design Framework for Structures/Materials with Enhanced Mechanical Performance. Materials2018, 11, 576.
Liu, J.; Fan, X.; Wen, G.; Qing, Q.; Wang, H.; Zhao, G. A Novel Design Framework for Structures/Materials with Enhanced Mechanical Performance. Materials 2018, 11, 576.
Abstract
Structure/material requires simultaneous consideration of both its design and manufacturing processes to dramatically enhance its manufacturability, assembly and maintainability. In this work, we present a novel design framework for structure/material with requested mechanical performances in virtue of the compelling properties of topological design and origami techniques. The framework comprises four procedures, including topological design, unfold, reduction manufacturing, and fold. Topological design method, i.e. Solid Isotropic Material Penalization (SIMP) method, serves to optimize the structure to achieve preferred mechanical characteristics and origami technique is exploited to make the structure rapidly and easily fabricated. Topological design and unfold procedures can be conveniently completed in a computer; then, reduction manufacturing, i.e. cutting, is performed to remove materials from the unfolded flat plate; the final structure is finally obtained by folding the plate of the previous procedure. A series of cantilevers, consisting of origami with parallel creases and Miura-ori (usually regarded as a metamaterial), made of paperboard are designed with least weight and required stiffness by using the proposed framework. The findings here furnish an alternative design framework for engineering structures which could be better than 3D printing technique, especially for large structures made of thin metal materials.
Keywords
design and fabrication framework; origami; topological design
Subject
Engineering, Mechanical Engineering
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
