US Patent Issued to Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America on July 15 for "Methods of designing inflatable shape-morphing structures with textured patterns" (American, Japanese Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 16 -- United States Patent no. 12,361,183, issued on July 15, was assigned to Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America Inc. (Plano, Texas).

"Methods of designing inflatable shape-morphing structures with textured patterns" was invented by Masato Tanaka (Ann Arbor, Mich.), Tsuyoshi Nomura (Nagoya, Japan) and Yuyang Song (Ann Arbor, Mich.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method of designing an inflatable structure includes generating a finite element mesh defining a plurality of elements for an inflatable shape-morphing structure, calculating a topology optimization analysis for the inflatable shape-morphing structure having a final shape in an inflated state...