The origami wooden board structure can bear loads and be folded

Using laser cutting technology and joining triangular boards of uniform thickness, the engineering team creates good load-bearing structures .

Foldable origami structure made from heavy-duty fiberboard panels. (Video: Michigan Engineering)

Engineers Evgueni T. Filipov and Yi Zhu at the University of Michigan, USA, developed a foldable modular origami structure consisting of load-bearing wood fiber boards with high applicability, Design Boom reported on March 20. . This structure can be used as a bridge, to build a habitat on the Moon, to be used as an emergency shelter, walls, floors, columns.

The engineering team uses laser cutting machines to shape medium-density fiberboard panels. They then joined each individual panel using aluminum hinges and locking pins. These two components turn the fiberboard panels into an origami (Japanese art of paper folding) structure . The triangular panel does not depend on the forward direction and can be installed in any direction needed. They have symmetrical pairing holes on both sides.

Yi Zhu said that to build common structures such as bridges and bus stations with origami, mathematical tools are needed that directly evaluate thickness during the initial design stage. Then, the research team discovered that uniformity in the origami structure is the key to allowing fiberboard to withstand loads. "If you add one thickness here and another thickness there, it becomes a mismatch. When load is applied to these parts, warping begins to occur ," Evgueni T. Filipov explained.

The engineering team uses laser cutting machines to shape medium-density fiberboard panels.

Engineer Evgueni T. Filipov said that many current origami systems lack uniformity in thickness. "Once that is achieved, combined with appropriate locking devices, the weight applied can be evenly distributed throughout the structure ," he said. In the new study, a team of engineers shows how they turned load-bearing fiberboard panels into a 4m-long pedestrian bridge, a 2m-high bus stop, and a 4m-high column.

Origami fiberboard construction technology can help quickly rebuild facilities and systems damaged or destroyed in natural disasters. In addition, technology can also be deployed in places that were previously considered impractical, such as outer space or the Moon, or applied to projects that need to be built and dismantled quickly, such as concert stages. concerts, events.