When Four Creases Meet: Technical Tesselations

What Cranes and Sandwiches Have in Common

Yves Klett; Klaus Drechsler

Institute of Aircraft Design (IFB)
Universität Stuttgart, Germany

Abstract

Folded structures perform countless duties during everyday life. From tea bags and cardboard boxes to oil filters and airbags, clever folding can result in surprising—and surprisingly efficient—results. Origami, the art of folding paper, is mainly associated with handicraft work or beautiful paper sculptures, but in fact also offers a vast playground for mathematical analysis of the seemingly simple processes that lead from a flat, two-dimensional shape to complex 3D-structures.

Origami is mostly made up from a number of very simple crease types that can be combined to form arbitrarily complex structures. The understanding of the folding process and the ability to design folded structures to very close specifications can be used to find efficient solutions to complex technical problems. Especially for modern lightweight applications, modular isometric origami (MIOs) offer an innovative approach to build high-performance structures. These so-called foldcores come in a multitude of flavors and help to build lighter and more efficient future aircraft.

This talk will present some basics on isometric folding and a number of different MIO structures together with application examples. Mathematica was used to develop, study and manufacture these MIOs in the course of several research projects at IFB and the resulting framework is continuously expanded to develop structures that are geometrically fascinating, aesthetically pleasing and highly efficient at the same time. Besides, they can be a lot of fun, too...