Harvard team develops origami-inspired 3D structural material

According to the team, the structural metamaterial - which is is tuneable and self actuated - can change size, volume and shape, and can fold flat to withstand huge weights before popping back up undamaged.

"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, first author of the research paper, which appears in the journal Nature Communications.

"It works from the nanoscale to the metre-scale and could be used to make anything from surgical stents to portable pop-up domes for disaster relief."

The structure is formed from extruded cubes with 24 faces and 36 edges.  Like origami, the cube can be folded along its edges, which act like hinges. Pneumatic actuators were embedded into the structure, which can be programmed to deform specific hinges, changing the cube's shape and size, and removing the need for external input.