Elastic buckling shape control of thin-walled cylinder using pre-embedded curved-crease origami patterns

Decades of research has led to a comprehensive understanding of the buckling behaviour of thin-walled tubes. Many of these studies have attempted to control the buckling-behaviour of thin-walled tubes by utilising their imperfection sensitive characteristics to guide the deformation process to a predictable buckling mode. However, a key limitation of such techniques is an inability to predict the exact deformed shape of post-buckled tubes. This study presents a new method to control the shape of an elastically buckled medium length thin-walled cylinder by using pre-embedded curved-crease origami patterns. The failure mode is pre-determined as a stabilized high-order elastica surface, which manifests via a diamond buckling mode. A set of prototypes are tested and show that the buckling process can be guided to a range of designed failure modes. The deformed surface is measured and shown to have a near-exact correspondence to the analytical description, where the average absolute surface error is less than half of the 0.3mm sheet thickness. This study then closely explores the driving mechanics of the buckling process and shows that the controllable buckling process exhibits a bistable transition from a higher strain energy tubular state to a lower strain energy curved-crease state