Origami-Inspired Engineering: Fold, Bend, Design, Build

Abstract

For more than 500 years, origami artists have been creating sculpted cranes, turtles, and any number of other natural and mythical creatures from single sheets of paper. Japanese art of paper folding has long been appreciated for the astonishing variety of forms its intricate folds can make from a flat square of paper. Now, the principles of origami are being brought to a wide range of applications, combining the ancient art with modern materials and applying its design principles to current problems to yield surprising new solutions in fields as diverse as medicine, and automotive engineering. artistry of origami lies in its intricate folds, which manipulate paper to create intricate, three-dimensional representations of animals, flowers, and mythical creatures. mathematics behind origami's folds have been studied for over a hundred years. As far back as the late 19th century, paper folding was used to demonstrate geometric proofs. Computer scientists and mathematicians have worked for decades on algorithms to model complex folded shapes. But until recently, these studies have largely been purely academic exercises. Real interest in applying these folding patterns to real-world applications has only just emerged. Specifically, origami is useful for the insight it offers into how materials can be folded down into highly compact shapes, which can then be unfolded to deploy as much larger devices. process that condenses a three-dimensional polygon into a compact flat shape is largely the same process an origami artist uses to turn a flat sheet of paper into a three-dimensional object. In these cases, the folds are very basic, but the motivating principles are the same. What's new is the engineering coming into it, where we're using engineering materials instead of paper, said Mary Frecker, a professor of mechanical engineering and biomedical engineering at the Pennsylvania State University. Those engineering materials include, for instance, instruments for minimally invasive surgeries that rely on origami-inspired creases to fold down into compact shapes and expand once they've passed through the incision. Or a flat sheet of paper with chemical reagents embedded in it that can be folded into multiple layers to create a simple blood-testing device that can check for several markers at once. There are also applications outside of the biomedical industry. Origami has been used to design automobile airbags so that they deploy reliably. Another application we've been looking at that is not biomedical is in aerospace, said Frecker. The most practical application that we're working on is the Starshade, a large space-based structure used to block the light of a nearby star so a telescope can view the light of dimmer stars, farther off in the distance. Following origami principles, one of her students has been applying modeling techniques to the dynamics of folding and unfolding a 100-foot-wide screen to block starlight, much like blocking the sun with a hand, so astronomers can see planets circling distant stars. Other practical applications introduced in the last few years include scissoring portable bridges that can be deployed in emergencies and portable buildings that can be shipped flat and opened to make habitable structures in almost no time, for instance, in the aftermath of a natural disaster. Other applications, from self-assembling robots that fold themselves up from flat sheets and crawl away under their own power to paper batteries that fold down to the size of a matchbook, may be just the beginning. Of course, applying origami to the real world does bring complications. pure mathematical approaches on which new developments are based didn't consider real materials. We're looking at applications where we can't assume the thickness is zero, as is often done in the field of origami mathematics, explains Frecker. However, as Robert Lang, a physicist and artist who has studied computer simulations of origami folding and the app