Helicoid - nature inspired layup schedule

General Discussion
1

Just listened to a podcast that was talking about biomimicry and mentioned a company licensing the Helicoid structure.

Long story short, it’s essentially just offsetting the layup schedule by 10 degrees in a rotational direction.

The benefit is increased impact strength and lightness due to less material being needed, right up the alley of surfboard construction.

My first thoughts were you could use a 90 degree biax fabric and just rotate each layer 10 degrees.

Could work for glassing or my other initial though was fin panel layups.

On a shortboard you could do like 4 layers of 2oz. offset 10 degrees each layer.

Some links if you want to go down the rabbit hole:
https://www.helicoidind.com/videos

https://www.compositesworld.com/articles/creating-stronger-composites-through-nature-inspired-helicoid-designs

https://www.mdpi.com/2504-477X/8/6/228

Geometric-structure-diagram-of-the-helicoid-model

https://youtu.be/qBI_rVn5-2M?feature=shared&t=41

3 Likes
2

That’s really interesting. It might be able to be used in foam core fin production to toughen them up.

3

Hey thanks lawless, very interesting!

I just had a quick read through the article on composites world but have yet to dive in deeper.
I’m not sure , but it’s more catered to composites using a lot of layers , right?
Or did I miss the main point- most probably yes, cause I actually didn’t get what is the new patent here…if it was economical to lay every fiber down like it was optimum that would be the holy grail of composites , but as long your not working for the war industry there are limitations to material cost and time.
Technics like braiding have used a similar approach for a very long time for example, and the only difference I can probably see here is that they emphasize the change of direction one step at a time in small steps, which makes sense .

It would be cool though to see more lighter weight wovens with a variety of angle offsets… I was looking for triaxial cloth yesterday and couldn’t find anything sub 300 g/ m . I think I never saw something like 0/+30/-30 for example.