Supplementary material from "Nonlinear mechanics of non-rigid origami: an efficient computational approach † "

The special geometric arrangement of panels and creases gives rise to unique mechanical properties of origami, such as reconfigurability, making origami designs wee suited for tunable structures. Although often being ignored, origami structures exhibit additional soft modes beyond rigid folding due to the flexibility of thin sheets that further influence their behaviour.

Actual behaviour of origami structures usually involves significant geometric nonlinearity, which amplifies the influence of additional soft modes. To investigate the nonlinear mechanics of origami structures with deformable panels, we present a structural engineering approach for simulating the nonlinear response of non-rigid origami structures. In this paper, we propose a fully nonlinear, displacement-based implicit formulation for performing static/quasi-static analyses of non-rigid origami structures based on ‘bar-and-hinge’ models.