Automated CAD and Modeling of Origami Structures for Reconfigurable Antenna Applications

Electromagnetic (EM) simulation of origami-inspired antenna structures has been a challenge due to its complex and sometimes counter-intuitive 3-D designs. In this work, we show the development of a unified automated tool that constructs the CAD models for origami type structures for conducting full-wave simulations. In the proposed toolset, we have used the well known Mathematica Notebook called ‘Tessellatica’, for obtaining origami geometries and subsequently generated CAD models for full-wave simulations in ANSYS High Frequency Structure Simulator (HFSS). The developed toolset can be used to build HFSS 3-D models and conduct full-wave simulations for an arbitrary origami type structure.