Scientists working at the leading edge of material development have had great success in using origami methods to produce cutting-edge materials. James P. McInerney and Zeb Rocklin of UiO/Trumpeter lead this work. Their work centers on including trapezoid faces in origami patterns, moving beyond classic parallelogram structures. Their results, recently published in Nature Communications, uncover thrilling new architectures. These innovations have the potential to disrupt many other high-stakes engineering programs, including designing bridges, aircraft, and naval ships.
Origami, the Japanese art of folding paper into intricate forms, has been around since the early 1600s. Through the years, it has developed into a finely honed dye that can create elaborate three-dimensional shapes. The researchers aim to harness this art form’s principles to develop materials that can change shape predictably under different conditions.
Exploring Trapezoid Faces
McInerney and Rocklin’s study is significant, in part, because it focuses on the benefits of incorporating trapezoid faces into origami structures. Unlike parallelograms—whose definition requires two sets of parallel sides—trapezoids only need one. And this flexibility means a lot when it comes to designs that simply have special functionalities.
We learned that origami trapezoid faces can be used to actively block the system from flexing in any given direction. This is a different kind of functionality than just using parallelogram faces,” said McInerney. This new development allows experimentation in creating materials that have the capacity to perform in many complex and nuanced environments, as well as under different types of stress.
The study identifies two distinct ways these origami-inspired materials can change shape: “breathing” and “shearing.” Inflating and deflating the substance causes the substance to grow and shrink consistently, while shearing action allows the material to move in a rotation-like manner. Emerging capabilities These capabilities point to promising new potential for applications needing responsive materials.
Theoretical Foundations and Future Directions
Zeb Rocklin is a theoretical physicist and an assistant professor at Georgia Tech. Second, he provided a wealth of experience and lessons learned on the challenges of modeling these new structures. He told us that even just predicting how these materials will behave — that’s sometimes impossible. Under pressure, they can easily change shape in all sorts of unexpected ways, complicating predictions even more. Conventional physics approaches such as computational fluid dynamics often fail to provide solutions to these complicated issues.
Rocklin went on to explain how these materials operate in ways distinct from regular solids. She explains it, “If I pull on one side of a piece of paper, it’s stiff—it doesn’t break apart. But it’s surprisingly flexible—it can crumple and wave in the wind based on how I’m animating it. That’s a behavior that’s radically different from what we would expect from a typical solid, and a radically useful one.”
Even though their work is theoretical, the research team admits that it lays the groundwork for new technologies to be explored and developed. Our objective was to build upon this work to include trapezoid faces, McInerney said. He announced that the way forward was moving from trapezoids to more generalized quadrilateral faces. In tandem, the team will work to create better models of how materials behave.
Practical Applications and Implications
The impact of this research reaches well beyond the walls of academia. Origami-inspired materials have the potential to unlock incredible new design opportunities for engineering, architecture and beyond. For example, they might allow for greater strength and flexibility in architecture or enhanced functionality and safety in airplane designs.
Our research is theoretical, but it provides some important takeaways. These findings would create exciting new opportunities to deploy these structures more broadly and to maximize the benefits we get from them,” Rocklin said of their possible real-world application.
McInerney sounded excited about the new directions their research is taking. He warned us that we need to begin going beyond surface-level thinking about how our designs might connect into a functional system. He urged that the focus be on real life application.
As they continue their work, McInerney remains aware of the challenges ahead: “We still have a lot of work to do.” Modeling and predicting the behavior of such origami-inspired materials is a complicated matter. Such complexity only serves to underscore the more general problems confronting material science in our current age.