Thick panel origami for load-bearing deployable structures

Origami-based deployable structures are of great interest as they can be manufactured and folded from thin flat sheets of material. However, the thin nature of origami panels results in a weak structural form at configurations close to unfolded or developed geometries. It, therefore, limits the functionality of such structures in applications involving load-bearing and full-unfolding. In this work, we show that by using the thick panel versions of the origami structures, one could obtain better load-bearing characteristics, especially at configurations close to the fully-unfolded geometries obtained through deployment. Specifically, we compare and contrast the geometry and structural behavior of a Yoshimura origami structure made from thin and thick panels. We present and implement a geometric framework to calculate the nodal coordinates of tessellated thick Yoshimura structures with arbitrarily specified panel dimensions and folded states. We discuss the structural modeling of a three-cell Yoshimura at a meter length scale and perform structural analysis at various folded configurations. We demonstrate the suitability of the thick panel structure over the thin panel version for resisting applied loads at configurations close to the fully-deployed state. The results indicate that employing thick panel geometries could enable the use of origami-based deployable structures at large length scales, especially for applications involving load-bearing.