A method for shaping glass based on origami can create delicate and intricate objects that are difficult to make otherwise.
Household glass objects like jars or bottles are typically made by a combination of pressing glass into moulds and glassblowing, while more unique glass objects can also be 3D printed. But these methods are rarely ideal for making intricate and delicate objects: unmoulding them in one piece can be difficult, blowing requires lots of time and a skilled artisan and 3D printing can give them an uneven texture. at Zhejiang University in China and his colleagues wanted to try a completely different method, based on folding, to make detailed glass shapes.
Instead of first making a piece of glass, they started with a pliable material that they knew could be transformed into glass after being folded into shape. The researchers made this material by embedding tiny particles of silica, the main ingredient of glass, into a sheet of a soft and rubbery substance, called a polymer, made of oxygen, hydrogen and carbon. They folded this sheet by hand, much like a sheet of paper, into shapes like a crane and a feather.
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To transform the folded objects into glass they then had to destroy the polymer and fuse the silica particles together. Xie says that this required heating it at two different temperatures, first at 593掳C and then at 1260掳C, and the resulting glass was smooth and fully transparent.
It took a lot of experimenting to determine the right amount of silica particles that must be added to the polymer because too many made the mixture hard to fold and too little made the final object too soft and flimsy, says Xie. He and his colleagues also worked out how to use particles of zirconium dioxide or titanium dioxide instead of silica. Heating these particles produces ceramic materials, which are commonly used as catalysts 鈥� devices that can speed up chemical reactions depending on how they are shaped.
Xie says that he and his team were mostly driven by curiosity about whether the folding method could work at all. Now that they know it can, they are hoping that other researchers will be able to benefit from it 鈥� not only researchers who work with catalysts but also those who use glass devices full of microscopic channels for sorting cells or mixing chemicals,
鈥淚 don鈥檛 want to say that we can make just anything, but if you can fold a piece of paper into a particular shape, it is very likely that we can do it with glass or ceramics as well,鈥� he says.
The team presented the work at a meeting of the in Indianapolis, Indiana, on 27 March.
