Dr. Jie Yin and his Mechanical Engineering lab have devised new ways to bring 4-D printing to life, adding a new twist on an ancient art form.

 

Inspired by an ancient art, Dr. Jie Yin, Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering, and his lab has found a way to add a new twist to the capabilities of 4-D printing. The exploration has led to an article published in the most recent edition of Extreme Mechanics Letter.

 

Dr. Yin, along with three Ph.D. students and four Merit Scholarship undergrads, have developed a way to print 3-D structures that can be bent and manipulated into other shapes using light. As part of a new wave called "4-D printing", the group has taken the Japanese tradition of origami and kirigami into the 21st century with their process. Using shrink paper and infrared bulbs, these structures start as 2-D layouts self-folding to become a variety of different designs, from traditional 3-D geometric shapes to saddles and others that can dip.

This opens up opportunities in various disciplines, ranging from robots that are brought to life by a bulb and can self-propel, to architecture blueprints that go from flat to scale 3-D model structures in seconds. This innovation prompted their paper to run in this month's Extreme Mechanics Letter. One reviewer noted the research was "simple yet well-designed and well-controlled."

Dr. Ryan Hayward, an expert on polymers and 3-D folding from University of Massachusetts Amherst, gave a seminar at the College of Engineering on September 16th. Dr. Yin hosted the event. Dr. Hayward sees the future of these designs ranging from packing materials to energy-absorbing in elastic fashions. He mentioned that this research poses some interesting questions for the future. "How do we design materials that structure themselves? How do we build that into the process? We have a basic understanding about self-folding materials but there's a lot we still don't understand."

Dr. Yin and his lab created a demonstration video to show the capabilities of their work, creating a pop-up origami version of "Temple" using light.