Miles Wu
8th Grade, Hunter College High School
New York, NY
Optimizing the Strength-to-Weight Ratio of Miura-Ori Patterns
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Project Background
Miles has been folding origami for seven years. In the past year, he became fascinated with the Miura-Ori, or Miura fold, which folds a flat sheet into a much smaller area with a tessellating series of parallelograms. At the same time, Miles also started reading about recent natural disasters like the L.A. wildfires and Hurricane Helene. “I wondered if Miura-Ori origami folds could be utilized in deployable shelters, since they are known for their strength, flat-foldability and portability,” he says. He decided to test different versions of the fold to find the one that could support the most weight.
Tactics and Results
To find out which folds were strongest, Miles tested two different parallelogram heights (one and two inches), three widths (0.5, one, and two inches), and three angles of fold (45, 60, and 75 degrees). He also varied the weight of the paper, from copy paper to heavy cardstock. Miles ended up with 54 different variants that each opened up to 64 square inches, about two-thirds of the size of a sheet of copy paper. He set them between guardrails to make sure they were opened to five inches apart and put increasing weights on them until they collapsed. The folds proved even stronger than he anticipated, supporting 9,069 times their own weight. “I had to purchase fifty-pound exercise weights in order to accurately run trials,” he says. Miles found that smaller panels with steeper angles between them ended up stronger, and that copy paper proved the strongest paper.
Beyond the Project
Miles’ origami habit got serious during the pandemic, and he submitted his creations to a competition called Origami By Children. His work has even been featured in the American Museum of Natural History on its holiday tree. He has also folded and sold 200 origami pigeons of his own design to benefit the Wild Bird Fund. Someday, he’d like to publish his own origami book. Miles would like to be a biologist and is especially interested in how animals and plants can survive and thrive in cities.
