Woven Shell Structures for Twist-Enabled Soft Response

Woven shell structures are 3D surfaces of crisscross fibers in which the deformation of the architecture is governed by the local constitutive laws of a weave pattern. We investigate the deformation of woven shells composed of the radial and circumferential fibers under compressive loads. In contrast to an elastic continuous shell, woven shells show a twisting coupled with the compression, exhibit a different non-linear force-displacement response, and possess a high tendency of energy dissipation due to inter-fiber friction. Computational analysis shows the extent of axial twists and stored energy contributions for shells of varying Gaussian curvatures. Varying the degree of inter-fiber constraints in experiments reveal the dependence of hysteresis on the inter-fiber frictional interactions. Lastly, we explore azimuthal variations in the shell designs to demonstrate striking snap-through responses, which significantly enhances the tunability of the architecture.