Origami inspires impact resistant metamaterial

The team is said to have has created a paper model of a metamaterial that uses ‘folding creases’ to soften impact forces and instead promote forces that relax stresses in the chain. The team’s results are published in Science Advances.

"If you were wearing a football helmet made of this material and something hit the helmet, you'd never feel that hit on your head. By the time the energy reaches you, it's no longer pushing. It's pulling," said corresponding author Jinkyu Yang, a UW associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics.

"Metamaterials are like Legos. You can make all types of structures by repeating a single type of building block, or unit cell as we call it," said Yang. "Depending on how you design your unit cell, you can create a material with unique mechanical properties that are unprecedented in nature."

The researchers turned to origami to create their unit cell.