Discrete symmetries control mechanical response in parallelogram-based origami

TL;DR

This paper introduces a formalism linking geometric symmetries to mechanical responses in parallelogram-based origami, revealing how symmetries control Poisson's ratios and mode behaviors in these structures.

Contribution

It develops a linear compatibility formalism to analyze how geometric symmetries influence origami mechanical properties, especially in parallelogram-based crease patterns.

Findings

Symmetries determine eigenmodes of origami structures.

Modes are eigenstates of an anticommuting symmetry operator.

Symmetry classifies crease patterns with opposite Poisson's ratios.

Abstract

Geometric compatibility constraints dictate the mechanical response of soft systems that can be utilized for the design of mechanical metamaterials such as the negative Poisson ratio Miura-ori origami crease pattern. Here, we develop a formalism for linear compatibility that enables explicit investigation of the interplay between geometric symmetries and functionality in origami crease patterns. We apply this formalism to a particular class of periodic crease patterns with unit cells composed of four arbitrary parallelogram faces and establish that their mechanical response is characterized by an anticommuting symmetry. In particular, we show that the modes are eigenstates of this symmetry operator and that these modes are simultaneously diagonalizable with the symmetric strain operator and the antisymmetric curvature operator. This feature reveals that the anticommuting symmetry defines an equivalence class of crease pattern geometries which possess equal and opposite in-plane and out-of-plane Poisson's ratios.