Amazing stuff! Out with the origami, in with the kirigami! Just kidding!
"Inspired by the Japanese art of kirigami, researchers in Canada and France have designed a parachute that can safely and accurately deliver its payloads when dropped directly above its target. Tested in realistic outdoor conditions, the parachute’s deformable design stabilizes the airflow around its porous structure, removing the need to drift as it falls. With its simple and affordable design, the parachute could have especially promising uses in areas including drone delivery and humanitarian aid. ..."
"... a laser is working away inside a large metal box. The beam moves over a thin sheet of plastic, cutting it with surgical precision along a computer-charted path.
In about ten minutes, the laser has finished the job ... removes the intricately cut sheet from the box. It’s round, about 20 centimetres in diameter, and as springy as a Slinky, but it isn’t a toy. Attach a weight to the centre and you have a parachute. ..."
From the abstract:
"The art of kirigami allows programming a sheet to deform into a particular manner with a pattern of cuts, endowing it with exotic mechanical properties and behaviours.
Here we program discs to deform into stably falling parachutes as they deploy under fluid–structure interaction.
Parachutes are expensive and delicate to manufacture, which limits their use for humanitarian airdrops or drone delivery.
Laser cutting a closed-loop kirigami pattern in a disc induces porosity and flexibility into an easily fabricated parachute.
By performing wind tunnel testing and numerical simulations using a custom flow-induced reconfiguration model, we develop a design tool to realize kirigami-inspired parachutes.
Guided by these results, we fabricate parachutes from the centimetre to the metre scale and test them in realistic conditions.
We show that at low load-to-area ratios, kirigami-inspired parachutes exhibit a comparable terminal velocity to conventional ones.
However, unlike conventional parachutes that require a gliding angle for vertical stability and fall at random far from a target, our kirigami-inspired parachutes always fall near the target, regardless of their initial release angle.
These kinds of parachutes could limit material losses during airdropping as well as decrease manufacturing costs and complexity."
A parachute from Polytechnique Montréal lands in "Nature" (original news release)
Kirigami-inspired parachutes with programmable reconfiguration (no public access, but article above contains link to PDF)
With a bottle attached
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