ORICRETE: Modeling support for design and manufacturing of folded concrete structures

The paper presents a flexible and efficient modeling approach to the simulation of the folding process of general crease patterns. The development of the model has been motivated by the need to provide support for targeted design and efficient manufacturing of shell structures inspired by the origami technique. This type of structures is becoming increasingly popular in many engineering disciplines and has been referred to as origamics. In the present work the folding technique is used to produce spatial structures from continuously reinforced thin-walled cementitious composite plates without the need to construct curved spatial formworks. In order to support the targetted design and manufacturing of folded concrete (oricrete) structures numerical model has been formulated as an optimization framework with several types of optimality conditions and equality constraints. The model is used both for form-finding of the spatial structure and for the realization of the manufacturing process.