The Miura Fold – Week of 2/9/15

The First Week

It has been a great first week, and I already have an idea for the device I will make by the end of my SRP! On Tuesday, I went to Dr. Melde’s office at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of Arizona to fill out some paperwork so that I could get a CatCard, a code to enter the room I would be working in, and a room privilege card. Fortunately, I had interned at the University of Arizona before, so I got to skip a lot of the paperwork! In the process, I met these four awesome grad students who are also working under Dr. Melde and will be helping me in my endeavors.

One of them even speaks Bengali (a language I can speak)! I will be working a little bit right of the image above. Here is my workspace: 

The Idea

As for my project, through some research I found an interesting fold called the Miura Fold that can be used to compress a sheet into an extremely compact form. It looks a bit like this:

Source: http://www.ijpam.eu/contents/2012-79-2/8/8.pdf

Though at first it may look like a bunch of vertical and horizontal folds used to fold a piece of paper into a single square, it is actually a tessellation of parallelograms folded with a specific number of mountain and valley folds in order to give the paper a set of interesting properties. For example, the structure of this fold causes the paper to have a spring constant much like how the structure of springs give them a spring constant. Imperfections in the fold alter the spring constant of the structure. Also, it has a memory of how it has been folded originally and resists being folded in any other way. Finally, this fold can be compressed and decompressed simply through holding two opposite corners of the paper and then pushing or pulling. Due to these properties, in history the Miura fold was used to fold maps so that they could quickly be opened and closed into a compressed state. In the 1990s, the Japanese space program used the Miura fold to unfold solar panels in space (I will put links for further reading at the end of this post). What I would like to do with this fold is to put little solar panels on each parallelogram of the fold, attach a motor to the setup, connect the solar panels in series or parallel based on the needs of the motor, and finally connect the motor to a set of wheels to essentially create a foldable rover.

After discussing my idea with Dr. Melde and her grad students, they think my idea is viable, but they want me to build on it (maybe have the solar panels open up based on the needs of the rover?). I am not too sure how to add to it at this point, and I foresee a few problems with my idea (ex. What foldable material will I use?), but hopefully I can add to my idea and solve these problems over the next few weeks! Until then!

-Parthib Samadder

Further Reading

• http://www.ijpam.eu/contents/2012-79-2/8/8.pdf
• http://www.origami-resource-center.com/origami-science.html