Origami and Engineering - An Introduction

Hello Visitor!

My name is Parthib Samadder, and I am currently a senior at BASIS Tucson North. For our third trimester, many seniors engage in Senior Research Projects (SRP) to explore any field that may catch their interests. During the college application process, I realized that although I was thinking about pursing an electrical engineering major, I had little experience with the field. As a result, I decided that my SRP would be a great time to explore the field. 

After e-mailing a few contacts that my BASIS Advisor and Astrophysics teacher Dr. Rex gave me, I came in contact with Dr. Melde who proposed I work with the applications of origami to engineering. Having been born in Japan, I have always loved and been connected to origami, so Dr. Melde’s idea immediately caught my interest. It turns out that recently, mathematicians and engineers have been able to apply their fields to origami in order to produce any type of 3D object simply through folding paper. As one can imagine, computing the origami folds require intensive mathematical computations as well as computer models. Depending on how far I get into my SRP, I may delve into the computational aspects of origami. However, as Robert Lang said when discussing the topic, “The problem that is being solved here is that…something needs to be big and sheet-like at its destination but be small for the journey…” In other words, the main application of origami to engineering is letting some object be small in transit and large at its destination.
 

Currently, the end goal of my project is to create a device that takes advantage of origami in order to have a compact form and a decompressed form. The first week will probably involve me coming up with ideas and then discussing them with Dr. Melde or her grad students. Until then!

-Parthib Samadder