BRITE Pivot: High-Volume Manufacturing of Origami-Inspired Structures and Forms for Building Construction

Modern manufacturing techniques reduce price and increase quality of many of the products we use every day. However, buildings continue to be manufactured on-site with high levels of skilled manual labor. This leads to higher costs and lower quality, which are a key factor in the affordable housing crisis across most of the country.

Additionally, the use of manual methods requires standardization in many details rather than optimizing for reduced material usage. Automation in building construction methods has been limited by the difficulty of transporting large components and the desire to customize buildings. This Boosting Research Ideas for Transformative and Equitable Advances in Engineering (BRITE) Pivot award seeks to develop a new manufacturing approach that will enable fabrication of customized building systems in a compact state.

These compact components and forms can be readily shipped and then deployed on-site. This innovation is expected to decrease the costs of housing to increase affordability. The project will also develop a K-12 curriculum to increase awareness of STEM career opportunities among first- and second-generation Hispanic children.

The project will apply the little-used sheet-lamination additive manufacturing (3D Printing) process to fabricate origami. Sheet lamination applications have been limited when used to create monolithic structures, but sheet lamination offers strong advantages for creating origami since it leverages the strengths of the native sheets. The digital control of additive manufacturing allows for easy customization.

By selectively bonding and cutting stacked sheets, origami-inspired deployable systems will be fabricated. This approach will enable low-cost, high-volume production of building components such as concrete forms in a compact shape for easy transport. To achieve these objectives, kinematic models and fabrication methods will be developed and methods of converting traditional single sheet origami designs for manufacturing as stacks of sheets will be created.

The manufacturing process will be extended to fiber-reinforced composites by developing methods of creating local hinges in vacuum-infused sheets. Strategies for improving interlaminar peel strength will also be evaluated. Kinematic solutions for fabricating open structures and containers these stacked sheet configurations will be developed and demonstrated as scaled models of building structures and/or formwork.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.