Origami-inspired Cellular Metamaterial with Anisotropic Multi-stability

Abstract: Origami designs offer extreme reconfigurability due to hinge rotation and facet deformation. This can be exploited to make lightweight metamaterials with controlled deployability and tunable properties. Here, we create a family of origami-inspired cellular metamaterials which can be programmed to have various stability characteristics and mechanical responses in three independent orthogonal directions. The cellular metamaterials were constructed from their origami unit cell that can have one or two admissible closed-loop configurations. The presence of the second closed-loop configuration leads to the emergence of bi-stability in the cellular metamaterial. We show that the stability and reconfigurability of the origami unit cell, and thus the constructed cellular metamaterials, can be programmed by manipulating the characteristic angles inherited from the origami pattern. Two examples of such programmable metamaterial with bi-stability in out-of-plane direction and anisotropic multi-stability in orthogonal directions are presented. Our study provides a platform to design programmable three-dimensional metamaterials significantly broadening the application envelope of origami.