EMI 2022 in Baltimore was the first professional conference I attended, and also the first time I presented my research to a broader mechanics community. I gave a talk on curved-crease origami ship hulls, based on my work exploring how flat sheets folded along curved creases can quickly form smooth, stiff, and highly functional hull geometries.
In the talk, I described how we use bar-and-hinge models to design and analyze curved-crease origami patterns that fold into planing hulls. I showed that the resulting hull shape is highly sensitive to the crease pattern and folding extent, which means the same base sheet can morph between different configurations. I also discussed a simplified hydrodynamic model we used to study drag, natural frequencies, and motions such as heave, surge, and pitch, demonstrating how small parametric changes in the crease pattern can tune the hydrodynamic performance.
What made this experience especially valuable were the questions that followed—on practical fabrication, thickness effects in curved origami panels, impact loads, and how these systems might scale to real vessels. Those conversations pushed me to refine the mechanics and modeling in more detail and directly influenced the journal article that later grew out of this work.