Katia Bertoldi, assistant of applied mechanics at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), with postdoctoral fellow Jongmin Shim. Photo by Eliza Grinnell, Harvard SEAS.
Inspired by a toy, the collapsible buckliball represents a new class of 3D, origami-like structures. Playing with an expanding and collapsing toy (top row), researchers at Harvard and MIT were inspired to design a new type of folding structure. The result is a one-piece silicone sphere, dubbed a "buckliball" for its pressure-induced buckling behavior (bottom row). Photos courtesy of Katia Bertoldi. Inspired by a spherical toy that expands and collapses, researchers at Harvard and MIT have created a new type of engineered capsule, called a "buckliball," that exploits the phenomenon of buckling. The same types of mechanisms that allow a Venus fly trap to snap its jaws, or a dry, windswept grain of pollen to swell when it reaches moisture, now lend themselves to an inventive study of geometric expansion and contraction. The research was led by Katia Bertoldi , Assistant Professor in Applied Mechanics at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and Pedro Reis , Edgerton Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering at MIT.
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