This humble origami fold could open new avenues in the field of structural design
Origami, the ancient Japanese art of paper folding, has long since been a popular craft among children and hobbyists. While its ability to create a variety of organic and natural shapes--from flowers to animals--has been a long-standing source of amusement, researchers have recently discovered its utility could be significantly more far-reaching.
The discovery was made by L Mahadevan, who is the Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and Physics at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS.) He along with his team discovered that a particular origami fold could be central to a new generation of structural designs.
The fold, known as Miura-ori, happens to be a simple mountain-valley type of fold that serves as a systematic way to tilt a planar structure. The advantage of this fold is its ability to pack a large surface area into a compact, flat shape, making it immediately useful in applications like solar panels, solar sails and more. The Miura folded shape also happens to occur naturally in insect wings and in certain types of leaves.
"We found an incredible amount of flexibility hidden inside the geometry of the Miura-ori,” said Levi Dudte, graduate student in the Mahadevan lab and first author of the paper. “As it turns out, this fold is capable of creating many more shapes than we imagined.”
Real-world applications of this discovery include the creation of devices like surgical stents that can be inserted into the body before being inflated to clear clogs, and even to build roof awnings that can be folded when not required.
To be able to better explore the potential of this fold, the research team developed an algorithm that can create specific shapes using this fold. The resulting designs can then be laser printed for folding.
Interestingly, this fold is hugely scalable--it can potentially be implemented using graphene which is one atom thick, all the way up to large structures at the architectural scale.
Here, you can try folding this shape yourself.
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 "Mahadevan Lab - Miura-ori origami fold")
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