Armed with a large collection of origami models (which handily packed down for the journey to London), Aerospace Engineering academic Mark Schenk recently gave an outreach talk on Engineering with Origami at the Royal Institution (https://www.rigb.org/whats-on/engineering-origami). The talk attracted a diverse family audience to the lecture theatre famous for its Christmas Lectures.
Origami, the traditional Japanese art of paper folding, has received widespread attention from mathematicians, scientists and engineers to understand its properties and explore its applications. In his talk, Mark introduced the audience to some surprising examples of folding (have you ever looked closely at Mona Lisa’s sleeves?) and a few underlying mathematical principles of origami, ultimately leading to a surprising diversity of engineering applications.
These applications range from designer materials with tailored properties, to self-folding origami and deployable structures in space. To get a hands-on feel for engineering origami, the audience were asked to fold their own Miura-ori sheet (a common fold pattern used in engineering origami) from a laser cut pattern, and after the talk they explored the various engineering origami models brought to the lecture.
The event was hosted by the Dutch Embassy in the United Kingdom, and supported by the Dutch Academic Network in the UK (DANinUK).