fidelity of the assembly process and the accuracy of the models. The result is a deterministic route to 3D mesostructures with validated design tools that can assist in the selection of 2D precursor geometries, bonding sites, and stretching configurations for wide-ranging classes of topologies and architectures.
Dozens of basic 3D shapes, each identified with a descriptive name, are summarized in Fig. 2. A quantitative classification scheme follows from consideration of the buckling characteristics. In general, motions of ribbon-type precursors (i.e., thickness t much smaller than width w) are dominated by out-of-plane bending and twisting deformations coupled with large-scale translational motion (fig. S9). By comparison, in-plane bending is energetically unfavorable because the corresponding stiffness (∝ w3t) is much larger than that for out-of-plane bending or twisting (∝ wt3). The magnitudes of bending and twisting deformations can be quantified by evaluating curvatures that are defined using a local coordinate system (fig. S9). The bending and torsional degrees of freedom of these developable ribbons are constrained by the