Miura-ori tube metamaterial with tunable dynamic property

Abstract

Structures and/or materials with engineered functionality, capable of achieving targeted mechanical responses reacting to changes in external excitation, have various potential engineering applications, e.g. aerospace, oceanographic engineering, soft robot, and several others. Yet tunable mechanical performance is normally realized through carefully designing the architecture of structures, which is usually porous, leading to the complexity of the fabrication of the structures even using the recently emerged 3D printing technique. In this study we show that origami technique can provide an alternative solution to achieving the aim by carefully stacking the classical Miura sheets into the Miura-ori tube metamaterial and tuning the geometric parameters of the origami metamaterial. By combining numerical and experimental methods, we have demonstrated that an extremely broad range of natural frequency and dynamic response of the metamaterial can be achieved. The proposed structure can be easily fabricated from a single thin sheet made of one material and simultaneously owns better mechanical properties than the Miura sheet.