Simulation for Forming and Performance Evaluation of Structures Developed Based on the Concept of "ORIGAMI Engineering"

The “origami” is known as one of traditional Japanese craftwork. Origami is a technique of paper folding in which various complex shapes of birds, flowers and so on can be made from a simple sheet of paper. Origami is also considered as a technique to produce light weight three dimensional structures from two dimensional material. And the 3D structures of origami can be foldable and/or expandable. Recently origami engineering inspired by traditional origami has been advocated by some researchers. Although several excellent structures have been studied ideally and mathematically so far, from a viewpoint of engineering, formability of the origami structure is a very important engineering issue practically even if the structure has excessively elegant shape. There are two major origami structures, i.e., the “octet-truss core panel (shortly truss core panel)” and the “reversed spiral origami tube”. In this paper the formability, strength and crash performance of these origami structures are discussed. The explicit FE code LS- DYNA® is the main solver of these problems. The press forming simulation software JSTAMP is used for formability assessment and the optimization software LS-OPT® is used to study crash performance.