Why this matters
Conventional planing hulls are hard to manufacture and locked into a single geometry, even though real oceans demand different shapes for different speeds and sea states. In this project, I showed that curved-crease origami can be used to create hulls that start as flat sheets, rapidly deploy into smooth three-dimensional forms, and then morph their shape on demand to tune hydrodynamic performance.
What I did
I designed curved-crease origami patterns that reproduce two benchmark hull types: a deep-V planing hull with a straight planing surface (VPS) and a General Purpose Planing Hull (GPPH). Using a reduced-order Bar-and-Hinge folding model, I simulated the deployment of candidate crease patterns and used a Hausdorff-distance-based metric to quantify shape error between the folded origami and the target hull surfaces. I iterated on crease layout and parameters until the origami hulls matched the target planing surfaces with sub-percent shape error, while remaining flat-foldable and mechanically feasible.
Automated workflow & hydrodynamics
Beyond the core modeling, I built a fully automated pipeline that links origami folding, shape matching, geometric optimization, and hydrodynamic analysis. Starting from a target hull surface, the workflow runs the origami simulation, computes shape error, optimizes crease parameters, and exports the resulting hull variants directly into Powersea for calm-water and head-sea simulations. These simulations showed that the shape-morphing origami hulls can emulate the resistance, trim, and motions of their conventional counterparts, and can switch between low- and high-deadrise configurations to trade off efficiency and seakeeping on demand.