Development of Everting Tubular Net Structures Using Simulation for Growing Structures

Abstract

Many living beings show the ability and necessity to develop invertible, tubular structures to enable additional functions temporarily. The biological archetypes always demonstrate a high change of volume of the structure between an inactive and active state. This makes the principle interesting for many technical applications, where a certain geometry or an additional volume has to be generated situationally for a task and can only be accepted temporarily, for example, in minimally invasive robotics. A possibility was sought to transfer the archetype into the technical context and to evaluate geometric-constructive dependencies based on an inversion of the structure. The result is a practicable design for repeatedly invertible net structures, which can be used for products with temporary additional functions and volumes.