Material: Silicone elastomer
Trigger: air
Channels expand mostly perpendicularly to their direction, leading to a strongly anisotropic deformation. Playing with the channel density and the thickness of the top and bottom sheets, the deformation magnitude as well as the curling of the structure may be controlled. These degrees of freedom enables us to have a fine control over the deformation and hence to program a wide variety of shapes.
This strategy is actually close to the morphogenesis of plants: plant tissues are indeed made of cells, separated by walls, that are highly pressurised. Together with (among others) the orientation and production of cellulose fibres in the walls, this leads to the growth of the tissue into complex shapes.
PMMH laboratory (ESPCI-PSL, CNRS, Sorbonne University, Paris Cité University)
Nonlinear Physical Chemistry Unit (Université Libre de Bruxelles)
Tzuri Gueta (Textile Artist, Paris).
José Bico
Alejandro Ibarra
Tian Gao
Etienne Reyssat
Benoît Roman
Emmanuel Siéfert
Dominique Peysson
Tzuri Gueta
F.Auger
C.Barez
Baromorphs are initially flat rubber plates that contain a network of channels. When pressurised, each channel expands, its deformation depending on its orientation and geometry. The deformation of the structure being designed to be incompatible with the initially flat state, the object buckles out of plane and adopts a three-dimensional shape. Hence, the network of cavities codes for the final pressurised shape, that may be inverse programmed.