Modeling and computation of the effective elastic behavior of parallelogram origami metamaterials

Abstract

Origami metamaterials made of repeating unit cells of parallelogram panels joined at folds dramatically change their shape through a collective motion of their cells. Here we develop an effective elastic model and numerical method to study the large deformation response of these metamaterials under a broad class of loads. The model builds on an effective plate theory derived in our prior work (Xu et al., 2024). The theory captures the overall shape change of all slightly stressed parallelogram origami deformations through nonlinear geometric compatibility constraints that couple the origami’s (cell averaged) effective deformation to an auxiliary angle field quantifying its cell-by-cell actuation. It also assigns to each such origami deformation a plate energy associated to these effective fields. Seeking a constitutive model that is faithful to the theory but also practical to simulate, we relax the geometric constraints via corresponding elastic energy penalties; we also simplify the plate energy density to embrace its essential character as a regularization to the geometric penalties. The resulting model for parallelogram origami is a generalized elastic continuum that is nonlinear in the effective deformation gradient and angle field and regularized by high-order gradients thereof. We provide a finite element formulation of this model using the $C^0$ interior penalty method to handle second gradients of deformation, and implement it using the open source computing platform Firedrake. We end by using the model and numerical method to study two canonical parallelogram origami patterns, in Miura and Eggbox origami, under a variety of loading conditions.