This is a design principle based on a cornucopia shape - so that materials can be designed so that, rather than either having a consistent density or an articulated structure (being composed of a hard "bone" structure, flexible "skin" structure and a connective "muscle" structure), materials can instead be designed based on a density-faded principle where rigidity is mapped into a cornucopaic "filling" of the area of an object and flexibility surrounds the rigidity incrementally through the use of graduated spacing of pixles as printed on a 3d printer. So instead of bones and skin you would have bones fading into skin with no hinge. Graduated density fading. And so I imagine that the most flexible and strong shape that you could map into an object would be a single coil möbius spring - the closest approximation to infinitely mixable fluid dynamic motion. So spring things.
-- JesusHChrist, Oct 09 2011

Patio chair with cornucopia design (but not density fading) Cornucopia-shaped_20Patio_20Chair
[JesusHChrist, Oct 09 2011]

I... don't, even...

Mwha?
-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Oct 09 2011


There are entirely too many theoretical physicists out here in the snow...
-- Alterother, Oct 09 2011


//And so I imagine that the most flexible and strong shape that you could map into an object//

Is there some elision of the thought here? I mean, taken literally, this seems redundant, in the sense that a shape that you *couldn't* map into an object couldn't really be thought of as flexible or strong, could it? Or does "map" somehow mean "build with a 3-D printer"? That would be OK, but you should specify it, if that's what you mean.
-- pertinax, Oct 10 2011


There are some materials, like increasingly-cross-linked plastics, where this might produce interesting properties, but there are a great many where the changes in material grain structure would force hard transitions between states.

This reads like a semi-gelled pudding of thought-in-process, I suggest you rewrite and clarify a bit when you reach the more solid end.
-- RayfordSteele, Oct 10 2011



random, halfbakery