Design and fabrication of large-scale deployable origami structures with optimized multi-stable hinges

Project #IE.05 began in 2025 and will be completed by June 2026.

This integration effort will present a case study at the 2026 ARC Annual Program Review.

Ground vehicle lightweighting is clearly recognized as a critical priority for the Army, and essential for its plans to become more lethal, expeditionary, and agile, with greater capability to conduct decentralized, distributed and integrated operations. The development of advanced structures is key to implement this vision. Among emerging structural components, origami designs are particularly intriguing: when optimally designed and fabricated, these systems can simultaneously provide structural strength and increased standoff for impact, adaptability to change functionality/performance, deployment for space claim and maneuverability or full vehicle transport, modular design allowing for simple integration and replacement, and acoustic cloaking combined with thermal management.

In #3.21, PI Filipov extended the kinematic models commonly employed in origami design to finite-thickness systems, thus demonstrating the design and fabrication of fully deployable origami structures with unprecedented structural rigidity and robustness. In current designs demonstrated by Filipov, the tiles of the origami structures are connected by simple hinges, that require manual operation for assembly, including locking at the end of the deployment process. Unfortunately, this process is slow and prone to errors which makes it unsuitable for military applications.

In #3.24, PI Valdevit is separately investigating the design and fabrication of metamaterials for vibration isolations and impact protection; the rich dynamics of these systems is based on the assembly of highly non-linear springs with multi-stable elastic response. These non-linear springs provide interesting multifunctionality, including impact protection with elastic recovery and vibration isolation. In past work, PI Valdevit has demonstrated that similar multi-stable mechanisms can be used for novel hinge designs.

Here, we propose to integrate these two ARC projects to develop highly optimized multi-stable hinges for deployable origami structures, investigate the deployment dynamics, and optimize the response of the origami structure to impact loading. The integration of multi-stable hinges in finite-thickness origami structures is expected to result in efficient deployment and exceptional impact isolation with full elastic recoverability.

This integration project aims to achieve the following goals:

1. Investigate the range of non-linear moment-rotation response (from single-stability to multistability) that can be achieved with several hinge designs, as a function of the hinge topology, its dimensional parameters and the constituent material. Current designs will be used as starting point. Particular attention will be paid to manufacturability constraints and dimensional requirements.
2. Develop a reduced-order model (extending the Discrete Element Method (DEM) approach currently employed in #3.24 to bending springs) to investigate the effect of the non-linear moment-rotation response of the hinges on the deployment dynamics of the structure, and select the optimal hinge response; we anticipate that programmed differences in the responses of each individual hinge can be used to select a specific and desirable deployment path.
3. Using a combination of structural models developed in #3.21 and #3.24, investigate the response of the fully deployed structure under external impact loading, and optimize the response of the hinges to secure impact isolation at specific loads, followed by full elastic recoverability.
4. Develop a suitable manufacturing process to prototype the optimal hinge designs and demonstrate integration in an origami structure.
5. Test the deployment dynamics and the impact response of an origami structure with optimized multi-stable non-linear hinges.

IE.05