More than a thousand years ago, East Asians discovered how a newfangled product called paper could be folded into pleasing shapes, and the art of origami was born.
Today, University of Minnesota scientists are creating origami for uses undreamed-of by its creators.
“The classic application of origami design is in space structures,” says Richard James, a Distinguished McKnight University Professor in the College of Science and Engineering’s Department of Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics. “You have structures, like solar cells, that you want to deploy into space. You have to fit them inside a rocket so they take up the least amount of space. One solution? You fold them.”
In James’s lab, origami is being paired with remarkable “shape memory” metal alloys to, for example, improve both human health and renewable energy technology.
Metals that remember
Shape memory alloys possess the peculiar quality of being able to return to their original shapes after being deformed by factors such as physical stress or heat.
This property has found uses in, for example, dental braces made from Nitinol, an alloy of nickel and titanium. When bent around the teeth, they exert a slow, even pressure as they try to resume their original shape.
Preventing brain damage with origami
James’s work in the subfield of curved origami, which can produce undulating or even spherical forms, has drawn the world’s attention, including from Eckhardt Quandt, vice president for research at Kiel University in Germany. Quandt contacted James about using curved origami to design stents to treat brain aneurysms.
Aneurysms are essentially areas where the walls of arteries are weak and have ballooned out. Those arterial walls, including the ballooned-out part, can be reinforced with stents that are threaded through the artery with a catheter. They must be placed exactly right, and must often be designed to work with a patient’s particular aneurysm.
For this task, James worked with his former graduate student Huan Liu, who was experienced in the art of curved surface origami. Together, they designed a stent that can be folded and compressed, then placed in an artery. Warmed by the patient’s body heat, it unfolds into its original “stent” shape.
Prototypes based on designs from James’s lab are being developed.
Also, James and Liu—now a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech—have researched ways to design high-performance vertical-axis wind turbines that incorporate curved origami. They have launched a company, Whirrlenergy, to develop the technology.
As for James, he says he’ll never tire of origami.
“It’s truly a mixture of math, science, and art,” he says.
