This Human-sized Origami re-imagines Emergency Shelters

“Often,” he continues, “these things are built, but then left behind or destroyed.”

“It’s a great bridge between the mechanics of origami and its geometry, and it’s actually a great way to get to a large-scale structure. That’s very rare,” he says. Ann Sychterz, An assistant professor of civil engineering at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign and who did not participate in the research. Sychterz specializes in shelter design. “This is the necessary steps to get this work out into real life,” he says.

According to Bertoldi, we already have a well-known shelter: tents. The lightweight covered tents make it easier to buy your backpack through the desert. But assembling one in an enclosed space takes time. You need to tie the metal bars, insert them through the narrow holes in the fabric and lock them all in place. Implement bar-based structures a lot it takes more time and hands. The perfect emergency shelter is set up quickly when needed, and comes down quickly when needed elsewhere.

Naturally, extensible origami have a similar problem. Switching from 2D to 3D requires going to each fold. “The hardest part of the previous origami is that you usually need to operate all the hinges, so the operation becomes really heavy,” says Bertoldi.

The group used plastic sheets or cardboard for the shelter’s faces, but the origami magic happens in the hinges. Faces won’t bend, so something needs to be given. The visors were double-sided tape that connected laser-cut cardboard, or lines that were mechanically inserted into plastic sheets. This allows the structure to bend around it to achieve inflation and deflation. To put all the bands in place automatically, his team decided that maybe they could inflate the folds at the same time using air pressure.

But throwing air into inflatable objects is like compressing the spring and assembling the building. It is not bistable. “You compress it and it deforms,” Bertoldi says. “But as soon as the load is removed it goes back.” In other words, you can use the force of air pressure to deform a folded cardboard bundle and turn it into an inflatable tent, but then you make sure that the air stays in it, which of course precludes you from having the door.

Stability lies in minimizing excess energy: a ball parked in a valley is more stable than in the middle of a steep hill. Visibility means designing a structure so that the energy barrier is adequate to block its energy barrier or its state in an inflated or deflated state. The fence cannot be too high, or else it is impossible to inflate. But even the fence can’t be too low, because then a gust of wind can fall: “It will fall back and empty,” Bertoldi says.

“You have to carefully design his energy fence,” he continues. “And that’s the most engineering game.”

Bertoldi’s team designed their structures using triangular faces; the energy barrier of each structure depended on how these triangles were shaped, how the geometry was connected, and their construction materials. First they made calculations, then hand-sized physical prototypes shaped like arches and stellar explosions, fastening them with different construction materials and looking for a sweet point of energy barrier. “It took us three years to really figure out how to build the geometric analysis and the experimental part — how to build the bottom,” says Bertoldi. and many “.

Eventually, something clicked. Literally. As you pull the folded structures to spread them out, Bertoldi recalls, “You hear a at a certain moment clickThis feeling compares to that achieved with the bracelets of the 1990s: “It’s something you really feel with your hands.”