Crystalline tubular origami with non-coincident stacking enabled by isomorphic symmetry breaking for enhanced crashworthiness

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The developable double-corrugation (DDC) surface, also known as the Miura-ori, is a classic origami pattern widely used across length scales, from deployable space structures to shape-shifting biomedical devices. Although the original DDC pattern is flat-foldable and globally planar, it can be easily transformed into flat-foldable and globally curved surfaces through alternating changes in the acute fold angles of the facets. However, the broader design space of globally curved DDC surfaces remains largely unexplored. Here, using a crystallography-based design framework, we construct three families of such tubular structures and establish their geometric closure conditions. Their crashworthiness is then evaluated under quasi-static axial compression via finite element simulations, with selected designs experimentally validated using laser-scored, folded, and thermally welded polypropylene sheets. The results show that isomorphic symmetry breaking does not simply increase absorbed energy in all cases; rather, it provides a mechanism for regulating the crushing process. In particular, reduced-symmetry patterns promote non-coincident stacking pathways, distribute contact and compaction events over a larger displacement range, suppress densification-induced force peaks, and thereby improve crush force efficiency. This study demonstrates, for the first time, that isomorphic symmetry breaking can be used as a design principle for more effective tubular energy absorbers, providing new guidelines for origami-inspired metastructures for impact mitigation and protection applications.