Andrew Hudson has been making some beautiful curved-fold origami using grids from my recent work with electric fields:

ahudson

I’m really looking forward to seeing how this develops.

While we’re on the subject of origami…    (video)


I made this using Tomohiro Tachi‘s brilliant ‘Rigid Origami Simulator’ (He has some other great stuff on his Flickr)
You can see physical versions of the same corrugations in my earlier deployables vid.
Here are the patterns:

corrugation patterns

Numbers 3 and 6 were found in the 60s by Ron Resch.
I think number 4 was first done by John Mckeever and 2 and 5 by Ben Parker

The ‘bricklaying’ style number 2 in particular seems promising to explore further. It has a nice volumetric quality when fully folded and feels quite strong. It looks like it could be easily adjusted to give different curvatures.

I was thinking these corrugations might work well as the core in a (curved) structural sandwich panel. I wonder, is anybody already doing this sort of thing?

-update
just found an example of this sort of ‘industrial origami’ here: Tessellated Group

tessellated
Next step would be to combine it with something a bit like this pattern for variable curvature (by Tomohiro Tachi again).

tactom

Of course you would need to fold the linerboard as well, or use multiple strips. But doubly curved sandwich panels – Surely that could be really useful for all sorts of things!

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