What is it about?
Tubular structures are commonly found around us, such as in pipelines, buildings, and furniture. Our new design allows such structures to be packed flat and quickly “popped up” into something incredibly strong. This is especially beneficial for temporary events, such as natural disaster relief, where the flat-packed design can be easily transported and rapidly transformed into reliable building materials. Our design takes inspiration from bamboo, which uses internal structures to reinforce its tubular form. This makes our design much stronger compared to conventional hollow tubes, which can easily collapse under pressure. However, simply adding internal reinforcements was not enough to achieve the desired transformability. The most exciting part of our research is that the transformation is made possible by an origami-inspired system. Specifically, we applied a technique involving curved crease lines in paper folding to enable self-locking. When you look inside the tube, you’ll see that the internal structures follow the same motion principles as this origami technique. This creates an interesting “pop-up” effect during transformation, an unexpected feature that became a key focus of our study.
Featured Image
Photo by Philip Veater on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Deployable tubes are already widely used in engineering and scientific applications, including biomedical devices, aerospace structures, civil construction, and robotics. Our design not only opens up new possibilities for innovative structural designs but also enhances existing flat-pack tubes, such as inflatable and coiled systems. In a coiled system, a flattened tube can be pulled and automatically “pop up” into a strong, locked state. For inflatable systems, our design allows the tube to maintain its shape even after the internal pressure is released. We can also combine multiple tubes to create lightweight panels suitable for large-scale applications. For example, in our research, we demonstrated that a 1.3 kg panel can easily support at least a 75 kg person. For other potential applications, scaling down could lead to medical stents, while scaling up could enable stronger deployable booms for space missions. All these applications utilize the key advantage of internal reinforcement to provide strength while following origami-inspired principles for efficient flat-packing.
Perspectives
Our team is committed to further enhancing the tube design and exploring new possibilities. First, we plan to conduct case studies to evaluate the tube’s performance in real-world scenarios, such as rough environments and after prolonged use. For instance, we test the tubes by constructing a lightweight bridge. Next, we aim to explore the design’s applicability across various industries, ensuring it’s not too specialized and can meet diverse needs. We are also investigating new materials and manufacturing techniques to make the design more cost-effective and scalable, including the use of 3D printing technology to precisely manufacture mini tubes. This will help address concerns about affordability and production feasibility. In addition, we plan to extend the self-locking feature to different tube shapes and evaluate their performance under various forces, such as bending and twisting. This will allow us to refine the design and expand its range of applications. Some may wonder whether this is a truly groundbreaking innovation or a refinement of existing technology. While internal reinforcement and origami folding principles are not new, our contribution lies in combining these features into an intelligent geometric design. This results in a structure that is strong, easy to transport, and can be quickly deployed across a variety of applications.
Ting-Uei Lee
RMIT University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Self-locking and stiffening deployable tubular structures, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, September 2024, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2409062121.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
