Design and stability of a family of deployable structures

Abstract: A large family of deployable filamentary structures can be built by connecting two elastic rods along their length. The resulting structure has interesting shapes that can be stabilized by tuning the material properties of each rod. To model this structure and study its stability, we show that the equilibrium equations describing unloaded states can be derived from a variational principle. We then use a novel geometric method to study the stability of the resulting equilibria. As an example we apply the theory to establish the stability of all possible equilibria of the Bristol ladder.