CM4P - Eccomas Thematic Conference - COMPUTATIONAL METHODS IN MULTI-SCALE, MULTI-UNCERTAINTY AND

MULTI-PHYSICS PROBLEMS 11 September – 13 September 2023, Porto, Portugal

Multi-scale effective elastic properties homogenization and finite element

simulation of origami-inspired foldable structures
Israr Ud Din, Adnan Ahmed, Kamran A. Khan
Department of Aerospace Engineering, Khalifa University of Science and Technology, PO Box 127788,
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

israr.uddin@ku.ac.ae

Origami-inspired deployable folding structures have found increasing interest in

space, civil architecture, robotics, flexible electronics, biomedical engineering, and
biomimetic engineering. These deployable structures were traditionally made of metallic
materials. In recent years, fiber reinforced polymers composites (FRPCs) have become
increasingly popular in rigid and thin flexible regions because of their ability to achieve
high packaging efficiency and lightweight jointless deployable structures manufactured
through different methods. It is of high importance to optimize the folding structures
using the computational tools for which the elastic constants are required. Because a large
number of composites materials combinations are possible for which the experimental
characterization is challenging. Therefore, a generic virtual characterization framework
is needed to address this problem.
This work will describe a generic X-ray computed tomography (XCT) driven
framework based on voxel modeling approach to virtually characterize the smallest
building block of full-scale folding structures. Meso-scale real representative volume
element (RVE) description is developed from the XCT images using the supervised
segmentation method based on the parameters obtained from the structures tensor
approach. Then, the micro-scale homogenization schemes are used in the determination
of the effective properties of each voxel using the fiber and matrix elastic stiffness
properties. The meso-scale effective properties of the RVE are calculated employing the
orientation averaging method.
Finally, the predicted elastic constants based on this generic XCT-driven
framework are compared to the experiments to evaluate the efficacy of the proposed
generic virtual characterization framework. Also, the finite element simulations of the

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Israr Ud Din, Adnan Ahmed, Kamran A. Khan
CM4P - Eccomas Thematic Conference - COMPUTATIONAL METHODS IN MULTI-SCALE, MULTI-UNCERTAINTY AND
MULTI-PHYSICS PROBLEMS 11 September – 13 September 2023, Porto, Portugal

folding structures are carried by using the predicted elastic stiffness properties and
comparison is made to the fold experiment.

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Israr Ud Din, Adnan Ahmed, Kamran A. Khan