A dome of numbered aluminium plates, joined at the hinges with rivets, standing on a concrete floor

Bistable auxetic surfaces across scales

A sheet tiled with bistable auxetic cells deploys from flat into a prescribed doubly curved surface and holds it without a frame or applied load. The cut pattern is computed from the target surface by conformal flattening, and the same computation serves three scales: polyimide shells written by photolithography on a silicon wafer, laser-cut rubber sheets tens of centimetres across, and a self-supporting dome of riveted aluminium plates about 1.5 m across.

References

  1. Wang Y, Shum K, Song Y, Chen T. Deployable 3D architectures from wafer-fabricated precursors. Nature Communications (2026).
  2. Chen T, Panetta J, Schnaubelt M, Pauly M. Bistable auxetic surface structures. ACM Transactions on Graphics 40(4), 1-9 (2021). SIGGRAPH.