One Dimensional Mechanical Memory

Some bellows-like origami folded cylinders have bistable configurations, and the energy barriers between these bistable states are tunable with geometry. Stacked Kresling (twisted trianglular tesselations) patterns on a cylinder can be can be tuned to collapse or deploy incrementally. If these folded cells are allowed to interact, the interaction energy can shift transition barriers such that the bellows achieves geometrically suppressed configurations. We have developed laser-cut and folded cylinders where adjacent unit cells can either be elastically connected or completely decoupled. For cylinders where cells are non-interacting, these unit cells function as "bits" with perfect return-point memory. In experimental tests, we find that a cylinder-based memory unit of 4 bits can be predictably driven to any of its 16 allowable states with a prescribed sequence of compression and extension.