Foldable and Expandable Infinite Plane Structures Enabled by Multi-Hub Chiral Origami

  • Zhang, Zhaowei (Shenyang institute of automation)
  • Holzinger, Stefan (Institute of Mechatronic Design and Productio)
  • Lv, Zhengyang (Shenyang institute of automation)
  • Zhou, Weijia (Shenyang institute of automation)

Please login to view abstract download link

The stowage of large-scale deployable structures, such as membranes and solar arrays, is a central challenge in aerospace applications. Origami-based approaches provide an efficient solution by enabling compact packaging and controlled deployment. Among various origami patterns, the flasher pattern is widely adopted owing to its exceptionally high stowage efficiency. Extending this concept by combining multiple flasher origami units offers a promising route toward folding infinitely planes and realizing auxetic metamaterials. Recent studies have demonstrated methods for connecting flasher origami units using regular tessellations with prescribed patterns and assembly strategies. However, the systematic combination of flasher origami with arbitrary patterns remains an open scientific challenge. To address this issue, we propose a generalized strategy based on the integration of multi-hub flasher origami, enabling the compact stowage of theoretically infinite plane structures while explicitly exploiting the intrinsic chirality of the flasher pattern. During the folding and deployment of flasher origami, the central hub undergoes a rotational motion that defines the direction of chirality. By exploiting this chiral characteristic, flasher origami units with arbitrary parameter configurations can be connected with units of opposite chirality. Through an investigation of the ratios of deployed area to stowed area and stowed volume, while explicitly accounting for panel thickness, it is shown that the storage efficiency can be significantly enhanced. The deployment process is examined through numerical simulations using both an origami-specific simulation tool and a multibody dynamics approach. To validate the proposed concept, physical prototypes of a single-hub flasher origami and a four-hub flasher origami assembly are fabricated and experimentally tested. The results demonstrate that the proposed multi-hub origami strategy enables efficient folding and deployment of theoretically infinite plane structures and shows potential for the realization of auxetic metamaterials.