KinetiX - designing auxetic-inspired deformable material structures

This paper describes a group of auxetic-inspired material structures that can transform into various shapes upon compression. We developed four cellular-based material structure units composed of rigid plates and elastic/rotary hinges. Different compositions of these units lead to a variety of tunable shape-changing possibilities, such as uniform scaling, shearing, bending and rotating. By tessellating those transformations together, we can create various higher level transformations for product design. In the paper, we first give a geometrical and numerical description of the units’ configuration and their degrees of freedom. An interactive simulation tool is developed for users to input designed structures and preview the transformation. Finally we present three application prototypes that utilize our proposed structures.