A team of researchers took inspiration from kirigami, a Japanese paper art form, to create a new material — which goes from a flat grid to any desired 3D structure.
There is a lvery tenuous between mathematics and art. Apparently, the same can be said about materials science and paper art.
At first glance, the grid with a flat, tiled pattern developed by a team of MIT researchers does not appear to be anything extraordinary.
But just pull a small stringwhich sticks out on one side so the grill quickly turns into… well, into any three-dimensional structure for which it was designed.
The new material, inspired by the Japanese paper art technique known as kirigami, could have an impressive range of applications, from transportable medical devices and foldable robots to modular space habitats on Mars.
The new material was presented in a recently published in the magazine ACM Transactions on Graphics.
To create the new material, the team developed an algorithm that translates the provided 3D structure into a flat grid composed of quadrilateral tiles. The process mimics the way artists who practice kirigami (in Japanese, “to cut paper”) make specific cuts to “encode” or material with unique properties.
Akib Zaman/MIT
With a simple pull of a string, a 3D figure is formed
The specific mechanism applied is known as auxetic mechanismthat is, a structure that it gets thicker when it is stretchedbut thinner when compressed, the study authors explain in an article in .
Then, the algorithm calculates the “optimal rope path” to minimize friction and connect lifting points along the surface so the grille assumes the desired 3D shape with a single gentle pull.
“The simplicity of the entire drive mechanism is a real advantage of our approach,” he explains. Akib Zamanlead author of the study and doctoral student at MIT. “All we have to do is input our design, and our algorithm automatically takes care of the rest”.
After several simulations, the team finally applied the method to the design of several real objects, including medical tools such as splints or posture correctors and igloo-like structures.
Furthermore, the algorithm is “agnostic regarding manufacturing method”, so the researchers resorted to laser cut plywood boxes to create a fully folding chairon a human scale — and which supported the weight of a person when used as a real chair.
The study authors point out that there will be “engineering challenges scale-specific” in the case of larger architectural structures. But because it is a new, easy-to-use and relatively affordable method, the team is now enthusiastically exploring ways to overcome these obstacles — alongside the construction of smaller structures using the same technique.
“I hope people can use this method to create a wide variety of different, collapsible structures,” concludes Zaman.
But the team isn’t going to stop there — and is already planning to create a self-unfoldingso that the structures do not have to be activated by a human or robot.
