To mark Women in Engineering Day, Editor Jeff D Alessio asked 47 high-achievers with connections to one of higher ed’s most highly decorated colleges of engineering to give us the first
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One bright April day on a Harvard University lawn, David Melancon stepped out of a white plastic tent carrying a table. Then another. Then he made a few trips to produce 14 chairs. Then a bike, followed by a yellow bike pump. Finally, he carried out a large orange Shop-Vac. Melancon, a PhD candidate in applied mathematics, then closed the tent’s makeshift door behind him. This was what his team dubbed their “clown car” demonstration proof that a huge number of objects could fit inside a tent which, only a few moments before, had been a flat stack of plastic about the size of a twin mattress, then inflated into an origami-inspired shelter.
This Human-sized Origami re-imagines Emergency Shelters
“Often,” he continues, “these things are built, but then left behind or destroyed.”
“It’s a great bridge between the mechanics of origami and its geometry, and it’s actually a great way to get to a large-scale structure. That’s very rare,” he says. Ann Sychterz, An assistant professor of civil engineering at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign and who did not participate in the research. Sychterz specializes in shelter design. “This is the necessary steps to get this work out into real life,” he says.
According to Bertoldi, we already have a well-known shelter: tents. The lightweight covered tents make it easier to buy your backpack through the desert. But assembling one in an enclosed space takes time. You need to tie the metal bars, insert them through the narrow holes in the fabric and lock them all in place. Implement bar-based structures