ABSTRACT
Flexible drinking straw is a thin-walled tube made of Polypropylene (PP) with a small corrugated portion. It exhibits multiple stable states. This particular feature can be utilised to design useful engineering structures such as aerospace discrete actuators. In this paper we examine the transformation of a flexible straw from one stable state to another in order to understand how it achieves multi-stability. The corrugated part of a flexible straw consists of several pairs of joined conical frustum shells with identical diameter but various heights, Fig. 1. The focus of the paper is on the transformation from the fully deployed state to the fully inverted state, Figure 1a to Figure 1b, respectively.
