Effects of perforated creases on the mechanical behavior and fatigue life of thick origami structures

AbstractPerforating crease lines has been widely adopted as a practical method for achieving thickness accommodation of engineering origami structures. In a previous work, we proposed a perforated crease design with three rows of oblong holes that induces smooth folding behavior of thick origami sheets and improves their mechanical properties. Here we further investigate the effects of this configured crease design on mechanical behavior and fatigue life of 3D origami tubular structures, including the Bellow, Yoshimura, horizontally-symmetric Kresling, and inclinedly-symmetric Kresling origami tubes. We utilize Rhino/Grasshopper to develop a parametric modeling framework for the studied origami structures based on their respective geometric relationships. An origami model with or without perforated creases can be efficiently established by adjusting input parameters in the modeling framework. Then, finite element analysis is adopted to assess folding behavior and mechanical properties of the structures, and to predict their fatigue life combined with FE-SAFE. The results show that the perforated crease can alleviate the issue of panel interference, resulting in smooth folding behavior of origami structures. Although the mechanical responses are weakened due to perforations, fatigue life of the structures is significantly enhanced by an order of magnitude. We therefore expect that the perforated crease design with three rows of oblong holes can be applied to engineering origami structures.Keywords: Origami structurenonzero thicknessperforated creasemechanical propertyfatigue life AcknowledgmentsThe first author and the third author would like to acknowledge financial support from the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation, Germany for their academic research respectively at Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschung GmbH and Leibniz University of Hannover, Germany. The authors are grateful to the editors and anonymous reviewers for their professional comments and valuable suggestions in improving the quality of the paper.Disclosure statementThe authors report there are no competing interests to declare.Additional informationFundingThis work has been supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants Nos. 51978150 and 52050410334), Southeast University "Zhongying Young Scholars" Project, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, and Postgraduate Research & Practice Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province (SJCX23_0071).