Kirigami paper cutting offers alternative to 3D printing

The team, comprised of scientists and engineers from Northwestern University, the University of Illinois and Tsinghua University, published work earlier in the year on a ‘pop-up’ fabrication technique it had developed. Using kirigami, the Japanese art of folding and cutting, the team has been able to build on this work by creating more useful structures. 

“The key concept in kirigami is a cut,” said Yonggang Huang, a professor at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering.

“Cuts usually lead to failure, but here we have the opposite: cuts allow us to produce complex 3D shapes we wouldn’t have otherwise. This unique 3D fabrication technique now can be used by others for their own creations and applications.” 

The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It shows how the team made 3D structures from materials including silicon, polymers, metals and dielectrics. Some structures combined a number of materials, such as gold and a semiconductor, including patterns that provide useful optical responses.