The flat-pack design could reduce energy demand drastically compared to a standard canvas structure. PHOTO: CoExist

It has long been known that origami has many benefits like developing eye hand co-ordination, sequencing skills, attention skills, patience, temporal spatial skills, math reasoning etc. And now a structure design inspired by the Japanese art of folding paper may help the military significantly reduce its energy demand.

The U.S. military spends a lot of money transporting fuel around the world and it puts a lot of troops in harm’s way doing it. It therefore has every incentive to invest in more energy-efficient equipment.

With this in mind, Ashley Thrall and her team at Notre Dame have developed this foldable, highly deployable shelter. Inspired by the Japanese art of origami, it’s designed to be flat-packed, stuck on a standard airlift pallet and to go where it’s needed. Thrall, who leads the university’s Kinetic Structures Laboratory, says you can assemble it in about an hour.

“Origami is a great art if you want to fold a rigid-walled shelter into a smaller compact form,” she says. “We’re trying to mimic the folding we’re seeing in paper at a full size.”

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