Crafting Material Interfaces

The idea, here, was to come up with some interesting paper-mechanisms and actuate them using flexinol. The title might give you some indication of how well that all came off. The folding went reasonably well. This is a miura fold, a kind of square tessellation. It’s very easy to do, and folds down flat. All of these do, actually.

This is a paper spring, folded, essentially, using a very similar technique. I learned it on YouTube. Look up, ‘Origami Spring’. It’s a bit tedious to get the folds, but with a small push on the center, you can get very impressive actuation.

This is the crease pattern for the spring. You do this part first.

This is the process of folding the spring. It’s more unpleasant as it goes on.

And efforts at actuation. A number of different configurations were tried, to try and maximize the degree of change, given the relatively small contraction of the flexinol. Attaching flexinol threads to the back of the pleated sheet didn’t give a particularly noticeable actuation (though the nitinol contracted effectively):

Experiments with a scissor-style lever arrangement worked much better:

And on a larger scale:

Ultimately, to maximize the actuation of the miura fold, the entire sheet was sandwiched between a large lever, which was actuated close to the fulcrum with a looped piece of flexinol:

Presentation link (sans videos)