A new propagation of meta - materials are emerging from a seventeenth hundred seed .
That ’s the gist of a raw composition in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , where a threesome of engineer describe an entirely raw form of origami that they say turns a wide-eyed piece of music of newspaper publisher into a structure more than two order of magnitude of order of magnitude stronger than itself .
“ Origami engineering has really taken a saltation in the last few years , ” aver co - author Evgueni Filipov , a Ph.D. student at University of Illinois , in a video about the work . Filipov says that their organization could change how we build ballistic capsule , how building and bridge are designed , and even how shipping companies operate — and it came out of a lab that makes only paper models .
Their pattern is called a “ zippered metro , ” and it relies on a newer estimate in origami calledMiura - ori , or Miura folding . Miura folding is a great way to take a piece of paper of newspaper and fold it down into a very lilliputian piece of paper — it was really thought up by a Japanese astrophysicist in the eighties , Koryo Miura . Miura was imagining a way torobotize the physical process of folding up solar arraysinto a very small blank before and after they ’re launched into space — the design he came up with is still influencing NASA today .
anyhow , Muira ’s radiation pattern is common today , and it take shape the foundation for the zipper tube . But take a single fold up piece . It might bends pretty much any direction when personnel is apply , even directions you might not intend , as this GIF demonstrates :
But you could make that piece much more stiff , and resistant to that bending , if you glue a 2nd piece on to create a tube .
you’re able to even begin adding more case-by-case tubes together , create an even stiff structure that can still fold flat in the way you stand for it to :
Look ma , no bend !
you may see a similar idea at workplace in some skyscrapers , like the Willis Tower , which is structure around nine item-by-item electron tube that together make structural stiffness against insistency to “ bend ” laterally against fart or seismal effect . In the case of these researcher ’ zippered tubes , they ’re designed to move — but only in pre - draw ways dictated by their sheepcote .
The trio took that simple-minded idea and complicated in with dozens of canvas and underground , create super - complex structures that look almost honeycomb - esque , and can hold an awe-inspiring amount of weight unit while still being flexile .
While very coolheaded , this is just one model of a genre of engineering that ’s seen a bit of a godsend of late . There arewhole conferencesdevoted to the development of new ideas in origami by scientist and engineer . NASA turn to origami to design itslatest deployable solar array .
Here ’s how Filipovexplains it :
Origami became more of an objective for engineering and a science just in the last five geezerhood or so . A pile of it was drive by space geographic expedition , to be able to set in motion anatomical structure compactly and deploy them in quad . But we ’re starting to see how it has potential for a lot of different field of engineering . You could preassemble something in a mill , ship it compactly and deploy it on site .
These structures are so cool because they ’re changeable — after hundred of resort to heavy , permanent materials to build potent systems , we ’re see a novel generation of fabric that are stiff , but not unmoving .
[ All images and video viaGeorgia Tech ]
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