Four-dimensional printed self-deploying circular structures with large folding ratio inspired by origami

Abstract

Inspired by the origami, a series of smart circular structures with large folding ratio was designed and fabricated by four-dimensional printing in this article. The structure consists of the crease and plate parts by embedding the Miura-ori into a folding fan, and has the characteristics of bi-stable states and self-deployment by introducing soft and hard shape memory polymers. The shape memory polymer material parameters were obtained by the dynamic-mechanical analyzer, and then the constitutive equation can be determined. To demonstrate the folding and deployment performance of the smart structures, the experiment and finite element simulation was carried out. It is shown that the structures can repeatedly be folded and deployed by temperature-controlled shape memory effect of shape memory polymer. This design can be applied to the large-scale and multiple level smart structures such as antennas and deployable solar sails.