UNFOLD THE FUTURE
Designs inspired by origami are making strides in science and technology
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A girl uses an empty ball-point pen to score a large dodecagonal sheet of paper marked with precise lines, that run from a central hexagon to the corners. More lines connecting points of the primary lines run parallel to each other and to alternating edges. Together, the lines form a neat geometric pattern. After the girl meticulously scores all the lines, she begins to fold along the creases. The primary lines fold 180 degrees and the girl gathers them together to form a spiral wrap. She pulls and pushes back the wrap in a motion that resembles a blooming flower to switch between a large outspread flat sheet and a small three-dimensional tube-like structure.
This is the basic design of the Starshade, developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a baseball-diamond-sized spacecraft that can ‘unfurl’ to block light from a star. The sunflower-shaped shield flying tens of thousands of kilometres in front of a space telescope would hide the distant star from view, enabling the telescope to capture images of faint exoplanets surrounding the star. The design allows the large Starshade to be packed down to a compact size that can be launched to space.
Rocket science? No, the Starshade’s mechanism called the ‘iris-folding pattern’ took inspiration from origami, the centuries-old Japanese art of folding paper. An origami pattern called a ‘flasher’ involves collapsing a large sheet of paper into a tightly packed cylinder. “Once I realized this is how you fold spacecraft structures, I became interested in origami,” said Manan Arya, a NASA technologist who worked on the Starshade, in a statement from NASA.
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Source: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Source: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
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Source: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Source: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
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Source: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Source: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
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Source: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Source: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
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Source: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Source: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
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Source: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Source: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
No Child’s Play
Even those who have never heard of origami have used its principles when folding a paper boat or plane. Origami artwork can vary in complexity from simple cranes and flowers to intricate renditions of everyday objects and animals. Most designs are developed through trial-and-error and perfected by repeating again and again.
But artists, such as Robert Lang, are increasingly preferring to theoretically plot out the basic crease pattern of a new origami design using mathematics. What is significant while engineering the origami design is polygon-packing or the mapping of regions of the paper to the structure of the object being designed. Computer-based origami design aids such as TreeMaker and Oripa have also gained popularity.
With the power of mathematics backing it, origami has guided the creation of various technically advanced science projects.
Origami of Scale
The Starshade when unfurled is 85 square feet in dimensions, which means it is as large as a baseball field or larger than half a cricket ground. It is not the only large origami-based design that has found its way to space. Solar panels in space, that are used to power spacecraft and even the International Space Station, use different types of origami folds. A blooming flower mechanism similar to that used in the Starshade has been used by researchers at the NASA-Jet Propulsion Laboratory to create large circular solar arrays that do not require manual assembly.
Some space solar panels use a different kind of fold called the ‘Miura-ori’. With this fold, pulling at one end opens the entire structure with minimal effort. When the structure is open, it looks like a checkerboard of parallelograms. Large solar panel arrays for space satellites in the Japanese space program have been scaled down before launch using the Miura fold and then spread out in space.
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Tiny Robot Heroes
Origami can be used to make large structures smaller but can it be applied to objects that are already small? Yes, origami principles can be used to create self-folding designs in any size. “The fundamental laws of folding apply at any scale,” said celebrity origami artist and physicist Robert Lang, as reported in Popular Science.
For instance, scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Technical University of Munich have developed an “untethered miniature origami robot that self-folds, walks, swims, and degrades”. The machine, made of PVC and tiny magnets, weighs less than half a gram and is less than two centimetres long. It can even be dissolved in acetone.
Origami-inspired miniature robots are very popular with independent groups of researchers from around the world working on different prototypes. Scientists at Harvard have built a working ‘Transformer’ robot that can be flattened to take on multiple forms.
What purpose would such robots serve? “In the future, we imagine robots like this could become mini surgeons, squished into a pill that you swallow,” said MIT-based Daniela Rus in an interview with NewScientist. Rus’ team designed Primer, a tiny transforming robot that can change its exoskeleton ‘outfits’ to switch between activities like walking, rolling, sailing and gliding.
After years of research on origami robots, Rus’ team along with scientists from the University of Sheffield and the Tokyo Institute of Technology have demonstrated a tiny ingestible origami robot that can be used for minor surgeries in the stomach. The untethered robot can unfold itself from a swallowed capsule and can crawl across the stomach wall to remove a swallowed button battery or patch a wound, with the help of steering using external magnetic fields.
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Source: IEEE Spectrum
Source: IEEE Spectrum
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Source: Wyss Institute, Harvard University
Source: Wyss Institute, Harvard University
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Source: MIT CSail
Source: MIT CSail
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Source: MIT News
Source: MIT News
Folding the Double-Helix
The popular Japanese artform has moved beyond paper and paper-like materials and is now at the threshold of manipulating the fabric of life itself with the burgeoning field of DNA origami. DNA origami is the folding of DNA to two-dimensional and three-dimensional shapes at the nanoscale. The specific nature of the interactions between base pairs make DNA a useful construction material.
Folding DNA is not just an art form – it has found a number of applications from drug delivery systems to uses as circuitry in plasmonic devices, but most applications remain in early stages of conception and testing.
Beyond the medical field, DNA origami is also inspiring research in smaller and smaller microchips. IBM research manager Spike Narayan, who has worked on using DNA origami for microchip fabrication, said in an interview with Gizmodo, “Biological structures like DNA actually offer some very reproducible, repetitive kinds of patterns that we can actually leverage in semiconductor processes.”
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Tighter, Stronger, Stiffer
Anyone who has folded paper would know that a folded piece of paper seems to be stronger than and is more difficult to bend than a flat, unfolded sheet. The principles of origami can be used to maximise this effect by folding in specific ways. One example of increased strength through origami is the simple zigzag ‘accordion fold’, the same one that is used to fold paper fans. The zigzag structure has a greater ‘bending stiffness’ than a plain sheet.
Specific origami patterns can be used to increase the strength of materials even further. A team of researchers working together from the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Tokyo have developed a ‘zippered tube’ configuration that makes the folded structure more than two orders of magnitude (or about 100 times) stronger than the material itself. The configuration uses the existing Miura-ori technique along with a zipper-like interlocking of tubes to create the desired stiff structure. The tube structure is still flexible but changes shape only in pre-described ways, allowing it to be laid flat for easy shipping and storage.
“If you have a single flat sheet of material like paper, it’s very easy to twist and bend it,” said University of Illinois graduate researcher Evgueni Filipov who worked on the project. “But as you start to couple it, you start forming a tube. Think of a tube – like a toilet paper roll – it can actually be quite a stiff structure.”
Why so Meta?
Researchers have used the Miura-ori to experiment further with the stiffness of materials. Most known materials have bulge when squeezed, like a sponge but the Miura-ori contracts when squeezed. “This is desirable for engineering all sorts of devices you wouldn’t be able to make otherwise,” said Cornell University graduate student and origami enthusiast Jesse Silverberg, as reported in Futurity. Silverberg and other collaborators have used this feature to their advantage in the design of metamaterials.
What are metamaterials? “Metamaterials are like Legos. You can make all types of structures by repeating a single type of building block, or unit cell as we call it,” explains Jinkyu Yang, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the University of Washington, in an interview with Futurity. Yang is the co-author of a paper on an origami-inspired metamaterial that can soften impact forces, with applications for space vehicles.
Depending on how the unit cells are designed, metamaterials can be created with unique mechanical properties that are unprecedented in nature. By introducing creases into flat materials, à la origami, materials that exhibit different degrees of stiffness when they fold and unfold can be designed.
Material scientists have also found a way to apply the ancient art of kirigami, a variation of origami that allows cutting of paper along with folding, to the wonder material graphene. According to an article by nanomaterials expert Karl Coleman in The Conversation, custom-designed ripples in a graphene sheet can increase the bending stiffness of the material significantly more than expected, opening the door for the creation of new material structures with movable parts and even to wearable sensors that can be incorporated into synthetic skin.
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How to Save a Life
Origami-inspired science is definitely ‘cool’ and will likely have an important role to play in the science of the future. But how useful is such science practically?
Origami has found its way to the design of air bags in cars, the safety mechanism that protects car passengers from injuries during an accident. Designing an air bag is not easy since it has to inflate within seconds and maintain its tautness without being too rigid. Celebrity origrammer Robert Lang has helped a German company develop software that model the inflation of the air bags on the same origami principles that enable folding three-dimensional polyhedrons from flat sheets. The software simulation has been used to improve the company’s airbags.
Researchers at the Brigham Young University have designed a lightweight bulletproof shield based on a ‘Yoshimura origami crease pattern’. The shield, that can be folded into a compact form when not in use and can be reassembled within seconds, can be useful in protecting law enforcement or even military personnel from gunfire. It is also much lighter and easier to deploy than the steel-based shields that are commonly used, at present.
Since it makes possible the creation of light-weight yet strong collapsible structures, origami-based designs have a great potential for application in disaster relief operations. For instance, a team from the Graduate School of Engineering in Hiroshima University has developed a temporary and portable bridge design called the Mobile Bridge Version 4.0 using an accordion-like scissoring design that minimises warping. The 70-feet long bridge, that does not need existing foundations, can be ‘unfurled’ and fully deployed in less than an hour, making it ideal for reaching disaster-hit places that are cut off due to broken bridges.
Self-assembling robots of varying sizes may be useful for search-and-rescue operations in conflict or disaster situations. Origami-reinforced materials may also be employed to construct rigid temporary shelters that are easier to transport and erect than canvas tents.
The usefulness of origami-inspired miniature robots for diagnosis of defects, drug delivery and surgeries in the human body is evident. But origami has another more direct application to human medicine, as well and this is in the form of stents. Oxford University researchers including Zhong You developed a heart stent that works using the concept of a ‘waterbomb base’, the same design that is used in origami boxes. The stent can be contracted to be small enough to fit through a catheter and can be inflated to open up arteries once it reaches its position.
According to a Japanese superstition, a person who folds a 1000 origami cranes may be granted a wish, perhaps to save a life. In any case, origami-inspired science is already saving lives.
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Source: TED via Gfycat
Source: TED via Gfycat
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Source: Brigham Young University
Source: Brigham Young University
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Source: Hiroshima University
Source: Hiroshima University
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Source: Cardborigami
Source: Cardborigami
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Source: Zhong You and Kaori Kuribayashi
Source: Zhong You and Kaori Kuribayashi
Paper Toss
The practical uses of mathematically precise origami designs are understood but even a humble piece of crumpled paper, or a so-called origami ‘snowball’, can have scientific applications. A sheet of paper becomes a tough projectile that can be tossed at others, merely by virtue of crushing it. This is because the simple act of crushing paper creates a large number of non-uniform folds in the paper, thus adding multiple layers. The layers act like structural pillars adding to the strength of the paper ball.
Scrunched up papers are also great as packing material, which is surprising since neither air nor sheets of paper provide good cushioning by themselves. But the answer might lie in the paper balls’ ability to absorb the vibrations that pass through them.
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Print the Magic
“With most origami, the magic comes from the folding,” said Robert Salazar, a JPL intern who helped design the Starshade, said in a NASA statement. “You can’t design purely from geometry. You need to know the qualities of the material to understand how it will fold.”
This is one of the obstacles that has come in the way of origami-based prototypes reaching full potential. But with new research from Meiji University, mass production of origami with the help of 3D origami printers and robots may be possible. Researchers at Northeastern University including Soroush Kamrava have begun to use 3D printers to print objects that can collapse, absorb energy, and spring back into place using the geometric principles of origami. 3-D printers can also be used to fabricate geometric-shaped pieces in the desired metamaterials.
“Origami-based manufacturing will change our lives in the near future,” believes Professor Ichiro Hagiwara, as reported in a video by Meiji University called ‘Origami Changes Everything’.
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