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The key here is scale. What works in inches often falls apart at feet. The structure is holding about 33 psi over the area (which is rigidly supported from below), much more along the contact edges. By comparison balsa wood can support significantly more pressure (varies, but well over 100psi) but doesn’t concentrate pressure on edges.

Is there anything useful about this? Maybe as an inexpensive(?) core for high strength skins?

4 comments

> Is there anything useful about this?

Directly: no, the end of the article has a nice list of reasons why, somewhat hidden

(ex. "Actual shelters...need to respond to multidirectional loads" = these were tested with load in one direction)

Miles, if you're reading this, it's useful. You're already doing what .1% of people do. I call them journeys and emphasize they're a million steps without clear direction, and if you're lucky, maybe positive feedback along the way. You're just on step N < 1,000,000. This works out, in some way, you already know it's not literally "yes this is sooo useful that we should start autofolding it at 1000x scale". It will work out. maybe as exactly this, this with some tweaks, or the $25K helps you do $X, or the publicity helps you do $Y.

Improved cardboard shipping boxes.

If I can make the shipping boxes less fragile with same amount of paper as current cardboard box designs, it is a win.

Note that boxes may get pressure from all the sides(different kind of pressure & movements during shipping), not just from the top as seen in the images (or shelters) in the article.

I think the goal would be not to make the whole box out of this structure, but to scale this structure down to be 4 millimeters high and use is as the core of the cardboard (or corrugated fibreboard as it's known in the industry).

No origami can withstand the force of a UPS delivery person.

I loaded semis for UPS in the summer of 1967 in Milwaukee, between my first and second years of college. I worked 4 hour shifts at night, 6-10 pm, M-F. Hard job. Paid very well. Deep inside the trucks the temperature and humidity were so high me and my partner had to shift roles every 15 minutes, one of us outside the back of the truck selecting packages off the belt that ran along the back of all the trucks in the loading bay and the other inside the truck, pulling them off the long elevated metal roller-topped structure that extended from the back belt at the back of the truck to the front of the semi.

When the outside temperature was 90° and up, it was insanely hot 30 feet deep inside the trucks with no air circulation: we wore gloves and shorts. The noise also was incredibly loud, deafening. Toward the end of our shifts we were semi-delirious and exhausted and so we just threw the rapidly incoming packages over our heads back into the truck instead of stacking them as was proper.

So the damage was likely done long before the delivery person took it the last few feet.

Anyone who’s worked inside the sortation centers has also seen sorters crash and rip packages to shreds.

Obviously that’s not “normal” damage to packages, because those things certainly aren’t getting delivered, but it’s not like these things get handled gently by the automation. Packages slide into collection belts where they land hard on top of other packages, they zip down chutes to be loaded into semis, etc.

There’s a reason they want breakables properly packed, and it’s not because the last-mile delivery guy is going to shoot a three with your box.

Some science right there

May be we'll get something like cardboard egg cartons which are designed for vertical loads but for other types of goods.

> The key here is scale. What works in inches often falls apart at feet

Does that mean we could increase the orders of magnitude if we made it smaller? Lots of tiny stuff needs mechanical support. And lots of folded small things agglomerated is another way to say biology.

Yes, the math is probably somewhat similar to what carpenters use to determine if a tabletop will sag as a function of its length: https://woodbin.com/calcs/sagulator/

Obviously not the same because the force isn't being applied perpendicular to the edges, but still, almost certainly will be not nearly linear.

Closer to "mineralogy", plenty of things are both smaller and tougher (on this "support its own weight" metric) than cells or proteins with their squishy folding rules.

Even if we include things like hydroxyapatite in teeth, or even lignin, those are more like byproducts of biology than active biology itself.

> plenty of things are both smaller and tougher (on this "support its own weight" metric) than cells or proteins with their squishy folding rules

I was thinking microscopic versus nanoscale. Folding something out of a flat material is probably cheaper than machining it, and if it's stronger than additively manufacturing it you have applications in medical devices and aerospace for starters.

Microscopic is unnecessary. Tessellation is already used in space and medical devices (not mentioned in this article: it's used in devices like stents). The specific fold being used here is named after an astrophysicist and has already been used in space.

> a simple piece of paper, folded into a Miura-ori origami pattern, could hold 10,000 times its own weight

> Wu was especially intrigued by the Miura-ori fold, named after its inventor, the Japanese astrophysicist Koryo Miura. Famed for its use in aeronautical engineering, the fold has been leveraged to make solar panels for spacecraft and satellites. One of its earliest space applications was in Japan’s Space Flyer Unit, a satellite launched in 1995.

Yes, a young scientist gaining momentum.