An additive framework for kirigami design.

Area of Science:

• Mechanical Engineering
• Materials Science
• Metamaterials Design

Background:

• Kirigami, the art of paper cutting, offers unique mechanical properties.
• Designing kirigami-based mechanical metamaterials traditionally involves complex optimization.
• Existing methods often struggle with reconfigurability and rigid-deployability.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop an efficient additive approach for inverse design of kirigami mechanical metamaterials.
• To utilize the negative space within kirigami patterns for design.
• To enable control over deployment angles, offsets, and boundary conditions.

Main Methods:

• Modeling negative spaces as four-bar linkages.
• Establishing a recursive relationship between adjacent linkages.
• Employing elementary linear algebra and matrix multiplications for pattern generation.
• Iterative procedure encoding compatibility, reconfigurability, and rigid-deployability.

Main Results:

• A linear design strategy that avoids non-convex global optimization.
• Creation of diverse, rigid-deployable, compact, and reconfigurable kirigami patterns.
• Successful physical fabrication of designed kirigami structures using varied materials.

Conclusions:

• The additive approach provides an efficient route for designing kirigami mechanical metamaterials.
• This method simplifies the design process by focusing on negative space linkages.
• The findings offer new possibilities for mechanical metamaterial design and fabrication inspired by kirigami art.