Origami-inspired ceramic structures bend without breaking

Applications for this technology range from medical prosthetics to impact-resistant components in aerospace and robotics. 

Known for their brittleness, ceramics often shatter under stress, making them difficult to use in high-impact or adaptive applications.

That may soon change as a team of UH researchers, led by Maksud Rahman, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and Md Shajedul Hoque Thakur, postdoctoral fellow, has shown that origami-inspired shapes with a soft polymer coating can transform fragile ceramic materials into tough, flexible structures. Their work is detailed in Advanced Composites and Hybrid Materials. 

“Ceramics are incredibly useful - biocompatible, lightweight and durable in the right conditions - but they fail catastrophically,” Rahman said in a statement. “Our goal was to engineer that failure into something more graceful and safer.” 

To do that, the team 3D printed a ceramic structure based on the Miura-ori origami pattern – which is a way to fold something flat so it takes up less space but stays flat overall - and then coated it with a stretchable, biocompatible polymer. According to the team, the resulting structures can handle stress in ways ordinary ceramics cannot. When compressed in different directions, the coated structures flexed and recovered, while their uncoated counterparts cracked or broke.