An origami ‘rock star’ visits Penn State
Zoubeida Ounaies, the Dorothy Quiggle Professor of Mechanical Engineering, right, demonstrates a how a piece of piezoelectric material can be turned into a music speaker to origami expert Robert Lang, center. (Photo credit: Curtis Chan)
One of the top talents in the field of origami, Robert Lang, visited Penn State today (Sept. 25) to check out some of the origami engineering projects in the College of Engineering.
Students studying under engineering faculty members Mary Frecker, Timothy Simpson, Paris vonLockette and Zoubeida Ounaies demonstrated the active origami structures they’ve been developing in the Electroactive Material Characterization Laboratory in Reber Building.
The students’ origami structures, such as a dielectric elastomer actuator, actively fold and unfold in response to multiple fields.
Penn State received a four-year, $2 million grant in August 2012 from the National Science Foundation to investigate origami design methods. The work, headed by Frecker and including Simpson, vonLockette and Ounaies, seeks to develop active origami structures for use in applications in minimally invasive surgery, adaptive aircraft structures, reconfigurable robots and deployable space structures.
Lang was on campus to deliver a talk to the Department of Mathematics. More on his work can be found on his website.
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