Structural Design Process of the Garment

My final project mainly mimic animal reactions in case of stress. You can see the link my mindmap.

I wanted to create hybrid animal tentacles when it's trigger by stress and it will slowly rise.

I wanted to use Fiber-Reinforced Actuators as my working principle. The basic design consists of an elastomer bladder wrapped with inextensible reinforcements.The placement of the reinforcements defines the type of motion achieved when the bladder is inflated. By selecting the appropriate placement, it is possible to achieve combinations of bending, extension, and twisting. By varying the configurations of the strain-limiting components of the actuator (the inextensible layer and fiber wrapping), different motions can be achieved when the actuator is inflated.

But main intense was make this process in a reverse way.I designed this tentacle on Rhino.

I produced a double mold to make my tentacles. You can see the detailed tutorial on the mold and mold material from here

I had a problem with the skin of the tentacles. ı realized that 3D tentacles really hard in practice. Because this 3D shape is really hard to control. Air leak is almost impossible to prevent

I decided to think again about my wearable. I sketched all over again about my design.

I wanted to experience a hybrid structure, combine some structural joints inside of the silicon tentacle.

Again ı faced with the air leak problem and this time also joints were making problem inside of the silicon. it was a really frustrating process.

First of all, I wanted to make an experiment with printflatables for my tentacles. Printflatables is a design and fabrication system for human- scale, functional and dynamic inflatable objects. We use in- extensible thermoplastic fabric as the raw material with the key principle of introducing folds and thermal sealing. Upon inflation, the sealed object takes the expected three-dimensional shape.

To use Heat-weldable fabric, during experimentation, is really easy to pursue while working. When you detect air leak in the surface, patching with iron is faster than using silicon all over again.

I started to make tentacles from thermoplastic fabric.

Traditionally, origami-based structures are designed on the premise of “rigid folding,” However, every act of folding and unfolding is accompanied by elastic deformations in real structures. My study focuses on these elastic deformations in order to expand origami into a new method of designing morphing structures. I wonder if we follow the origami rules on the fabric and inflate by air can we see similar changes on the fabric.

I was really satisfied by the result. I decided to go paper folding methodology on inflatables.