Morphing of curved corrugated shells

Thin sheet materials of low bending stiffness but high membrane stiffness are often corrugated in order to achieve improvements of several orders of magnitude in bending stiffness with only minimal increases in weight and cost. If these corrugated sheets are initially curved along the corrugations, much of this stiffness gain is lost. In return, the sheets are then capable of significant elastic changes in shape overall, including large changes in overall Gaussian curvature. These shape changes are described here by nonlinear and coupled kinematical relationships, which are verified against experiment and finite-element simulations. It is found that gross simplifications can be made about the large displacement behaviour of such shells without a loss of accuracy. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.