Learning from origami to design new materials

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A challenge increasingly important to physicists and materials scientists in recent years has been how to design controllable new materials that exhibit desired physical properties rather than relying on those properties to emerge naturally, says University of Massachusetts Amherst physicist Christian Santangelo. Caption: Physicists and materials scientists are using origami-based folding methods, or tessellation, for ‘tuning’ the fundamental physical properties of thin sheets, which could help develop molecular-scale machines that snap into place and perform mechanical tasks. Credit: Jesse Silverberg, Cornell University Now he and physicist Arthur Evans and polymer scientist Ryan Hayward at UMass Amherst, with others at Cornell and Western New England University, are using origami-based folding methods for “tuning” the fundamental physical properties of any type of thin sheet, which may eventually lead to development of molecular-scale machines that could snap into place and perform mechanical tasks. Results are reported today in an early online edition of Science. At a physics meeting a couple of years ago, Santangelo mentioned the unusual properties of a special type of origami fold called Miura-ori to fellow physicist Jesse Silverberg of Cornell, a long-time origami enthusiast. Miura-ori, named after the astrophysicist who invented the technique, is a series folded parallelograms that change the stiffness of

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