Experimental Architectural Design Study on Internally Tiled Pneumatic Surfaces for Adaptive Moldability

Abstract This article explores adaptive moldable surfaces capable of passively conforming to varying shapes, activating to rigidly hold the shape or object, and then resetting back to a passive condition applicable in myriad industries. While various approaches have been demonstrated for designing adaptive moldable surfaces using traditional and smart materials technologies, promising advancements have been made in pneumatically activated systems utilizing granular, fiber, and layer jamming techniques. Unfortunately, these advanced pneumatic systems struggle simultaneously providing good performance across all three key technology subcapabilities (drapability, shapability, and rigidizability) in a compact, conformable, and lightweight form. In recent years, pneumatically operated tile-based approaches have emerged, offering various design advantages dependent on the characteristics of the tile architectures that address these challenges. However, the broad design space of tile-based approach presents coupled tradeoffs among the resulting performances of the key technology subcapabilities. This article systematically explores these tradeoffs, focusing on bladder-attached, internal sheet-attached, and mutually interlocking tile classes. It defines and characterizes measurable performance metrics: draping angle for drapability, conformability and setability for shapability, and flexural rigidity and post-yield elasticity for rigidizability. Three studies investigate the architectural design space: tile architectural class effects, design coupling tradeoffs, and architectural feature variations such as shifting tile layers and adding friction layers. These studies develop an understanding of the coupled impacts of architectural class and features on the performance of internally tiled pneumatic surfaces, catering to the design of user-interacting adaptive moldability applications.