Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences最新文献

The Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP) programme is an ambitious but challenging endeavour to design and deliver a prototype fusion power plant. It is a rapid, fast-moving programme, designing a first of a kind device in a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) environment, and digital tools play a pivotal role in managing and navigating this space. Digital helps manage the complexity and sheer volume of information. Advanced modelling and simulation techniques provide a platform for designers to explore various scenarios and iteratively refine designs, providing insights into the intricate interplay of requirements, constraints and design factors across physics, technology and engineering domains and aiding informed decision-making amidst uncertainties. It also provides a means of building confidence in the new scientific, technological and engineering solutions, given that a full-scale-integrated precursor test is not feasible, almost by definition. The digital strategy for STEP is built around a vision of a digital twin of the whole plant. This will evolve from the current digital shadow formed by system architecting codes and complex workflows and will be underpinned by developing capabilities in plasma, materials and engineering simulation, data management, advanced control, industrial cybersecurity, regulation, digital technologies and related digital disciplines. These capabilities will help address the key challenges of managing the complexity and quantity of information, improving the reliability and robustness of the current digital shadow and developing an understanding of its validity and performance.This article is part of the theme issue 'Delivering Fusion Energy - The Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP)'.

The design, delivery and operation of a large-scale infrastructure project are challenging at best. For the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP) prototype powerplant (SPP), the challenges increased dramatically. In addition to being a large-scale infrastructure project, it is a cutting edge, first of a kind (FOAK) technology demonstrator. The design teams are working in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment, where technology is constantly emerging, maturing and changing. STEP will be unlike any power plant ever built and requires the development of new technologies and capabilities, but also a novel approach to planning and maturing the design. By taking a holistic view of the engineering life cycle from the start, the programme will be better positioned to achieve an SPP that is fit for purpose and can be used to show a path to ultimate commercial viability for subsequent power plants. This paper will review the key challenges in maturing a FOAK fusion power plant and look in depth at how the STEP team are maturing the required capabilities and planning to ensure successful delivery of the SPP. This article is part of the theme issue 'Delivering Fusion Energy - The Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP)'.

The programme to design plasma scenarios for the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP), a reactor concept aiming at net electricity production, seeks to exploit the inherent advantages of the spherical tokamak (ST) while making conservative assumptions about plasma performance. This approach is motivated by the large gap between present-day STs and future burning plasmas based on this concept. It is concluded that plasma exhaust in such a device is most likely to be manageable in a double null (DN) configuration, and that high core performance is favoured by positive triangularity (PT) plasmas with an elevated central safety factor. Based on a full technical and physics assessment of external heating and current drive (CD) systems, it was decided that the external CD is provided most effectively by microwaves. Operation with active resistive wall mode (RWM) stabilization as well as high elongation is needed for the most compact solution. The gap between existing devices and STEP is most pronounced in the area of core transport, owing to high normalized plasma pressure in the latter which changes qualitatively the nature of the turbulence controlling transport. Plugging this gap will require dedicated experiments, particularly on high-performance STs, and the development of reduced models that faithfully represent turbulent transport at high normalized pressure. Plasma scenarios in STEP will also need to be such that edge localized modes (ELMs) either do not occur or are small enough to be compatible with material lifetime limits. The high current needed for a power plant-relevant plasma leads to the unavoidable generation of high runaway electron beam current during a disruption, where novel mitigation techniques may be needed. This article is part of the theme issue 'Delivering Fusion Energy - The Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP)'.

We explore a new design strategy of leveraging kinematic bifurcation in creating origami/kirigami-based three-dimensional (3D) hierarchical, reconfigurable, mechanical metamaterials with tunable mechanical responses. We start from constructing three basic, thick, panel-based structural units composed of 4, 6 and 8 rigidly rotatable cubes in close-looped connections. They are modelled, respectively, as 4R, 6R and 8R (R stands for revolute joint) spatial looped kinematic mechanisms, and are used to create a library of reconfigurable hierarchical building blocks that exhibit kinematic bifurcations. We analytically investigate their reconfiguration kinematics and predict the occurrence and locations of kinematic bifurcations through a trial-correction modelling method. These building blocks are tessellated in 3D to create various 3D bifurcated hierarchical mechanical metamaterials that preserve the kinematic bifurcations in their building blocks to reconfigure into different 3D architectures. By combining the kinematics and considering the elastic torsional energy stored in the folds, we develop the geometric mechanics to predict their tunable anisotropic Poisson's ratios and stiffnesses. We find that kinematic bifurcation can significantly effect mechanical responses, including changing the sign of Poisson's ratios from negative to positive beyond bifurcation, tuning the anisotropy, and overcoming the polarity of structural stiffness and enhancing the number of deformation paths with more reconfigured shapes.This article is part of the theme issue 'Origami/Kirigami-inspired structures: from fundamentals to applications'.

Mechanical metamaterials have recently been exploited as an interesting platform for information storing, retrieval and processing, analogous to electronic devices. In this work, we describe the design and fabrication a two-dimensional (2D) multistable metamaterial consisting of building blocks that can be switched between two distinct stable phases, and which are capable of storing binary information analogous to digital bits. By changing the spatial distribution of the phases, we can achieve a variety of different configurations and tunable mechanical properties (both static and dynamic). Moreover, we demonstrate the ability to determine the phase distribution via simple probing of the dynamic properties, to which we refer as mechanical proprioception. Finally, as a simple demonstration of feasibility, we illustrate a strategy for building autonomous kirigami systems that can receive inputs from their environment. This work could bring new insights for the design of mechanical metamaterials with information processing and computing functionalities. This article is part of the theme issue 'Origami/Kirigami-inspired structures: from fundamentals to applications'.

We present the design and evaluation of a simple, compact and efficient electromagnetic energy harvesting tile that can be used to harness energy from footsteps. The proposed harvester incorporates a translational-rotational origami-inspired coupling mechanism to transform the axial loads exerted by human footsteps into a localized rotation of an electromagnetic generator. The coupling mechanism employs a non-rigid tunable Kresling spring, the restorative behaviour of which is tunable to maximize energy transduction from the applied load to the generator. A computational model is developed to optimize the design parameters of the mechanism, which are then utilized to fabricate a prototype of the energy harvester. The tile is tested under loading conditions that mimic a human step, where it is demonstrated that it is capable of generating 4.18 W of electrical power per step with a surface power density of 2609 μW cm^-2.This article is part of the theme issue 'Origami/Kirigami-inspired structures: from fundamentals to applications'.

Recent advances in origami science and engineering have particularly focused on the challenges of dynamics. While research has primarily focused on statics and kinematics, the need for effective and processable dynamic models has become apparent. This paper evaluates various dynamic modelling techniques for rigid-foldable origami, particularly focusing on their ability to capture nonlinear dynamic behaviours. Two primary methods, the lumped mass-spring-damper approach and the energy-based method, are examined using a bistable stacked Miura-origami (SMO) structure as a case study. Through systematic dynamic experiments, we analyse the effectiveness of these models in predicting bistable dynamic responses, including intra- and interwell oscillations, in different loading conditions. Our findings reveal that the energy-based approach, which considers the structure's inertia and utilizes dynamic experimental data for parameter identification, outperforms other models in terms of validity and accuracy. This model effectively predicts the dynamic response types, the rich and complex nonlinear characteristics and the critical frequency where interwell oscillations occur. Despite its relatively increased complexity in model derivation, it maintains computational efficiency and shows promise for broader applications in origami dynamics. By comparing model predictions with experimental results, this study enhances our understanding of origami dynamics and contributes valuable insights for future research and applications. This article is part of the theme issue 'Origami/Kirigami-inspired structures: from fundamentals to applications'.

The bar and hinge framework uses truss elements and rotational springs to efficiently model the structural behaviour of origami. The framework is especially useful to investigate origami metamaterials as they have repeating geometry, which makes conventional finite element simulations very expensive due to a large number of degrees of freedom. This work proposes improvements to the parameters of bar and hinge model within the context of structural dynamics, specifically modal analysis under small deformations, which has not been carried out previously in the literature. A range of low-frequency modes involving origami folding and panel bending deformations that can be accurately captured by the bar and hinge framework are identified. Within this range, bar and hinge parameters like the lumped masses and the rotational spring stiffness values are derived using conservation laws and finite element tests. The best among the proposed schemes is found to predict natural frequencies of the considered origami structures to within 10% maximum error, improving the accuracy by more than three times from existing schemes. In most cases, the errors in natural frequencies are less than 5%. This article is part of the theme issue 'Origami/Kirigami-inspired structures: from fundamentals to applications'.

A rigidly foldable and reconfigurable origami antenna is developed here. This antenna uses thick folding panels thereby providing robust operation and folding/unfolding actuation, which are very important for many applications in extreme environments, such as space. Also, this antenna can be constructed using standard printed circuit boards, which simplifies its manufacturing. For the reconfigurable antenna developed here, the origami flasher pattern is chosen to achieve a spatial transformation of a dipole operating at 0.48 GHz to a conical spiral antenna (CSA) operating from 2.1 to 3.7 GHz. The design equations for the origami CSA are derived. A prototype is built using a 0.81-mm-thick FR4 substrate to validate the proposed methodology. The antenna parameters are investigated in a wide frequency range. Our simulated results agree very well with the measurements. The rigid structure of the proposed design and its reconfigurable nature make it a good candidate for satellite communications.This article is part of the theme issue 'Origami/Kirigami-inspired structures: from fundamentals to applications'.