Origami-Inspired Foldable Material Can Change Its Size, Volume and Shape

A team of researchers from Harvard University have designed a unique type of foldable material that is versatile, tunable and self actuated. The material can be programmed to change its size, volume and shape; and amazingly it can collapse into a flat sheet to withstand the weight of an elephant without breaking, and pop right back up to prepare for the subsequent task.

“We’ve designed a three-dimensional, thin-walled structure that can be used to make foldable and reprogrammable objects of arbitrary architecture, whose shape, volume and stiffness can be dramatically altered and continuously tuned and controlled,” said Johannes T. B. Overvelde, author of the paper, in a news release.

Inspired by an origami technique known as snapology, researchers developed the “metametarial” using extruded cubes with 24 faces and 36 edges, so that the cube, like origami can be folded along its edges to change shape. As MailOnline noted, the technique is also known as unit or modular origami and it involves constructing multiple identical elements and assembling these into a larger model.

Read more @ http://sparkonit.com/2016/03/12/origami-inspired-foldable-material-can-change-size-volume-shape/?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link

Terminator here we come!


"What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us."  ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~