Miles Wu wins $25,000 for Miura-ori origami disaster relief research

Miles Wu’s Miura-ori research

Most 14-year-olds may spend their time making paper aeroplanes, but Miles Wu is creating origami designs he thinks may eventually strengthen disaster-relief efforts.

The New York City teenager has received $25,000 for his study of Miura-ori, an origami fold recognised for its accurate ability to compact and unfold.

"I've been folding origami as a hobby for more than six years, mostly of animals or insects," Wu told Business Insider. "Recently I've been designing my own origami, too."

Testing deployable emergency structures

Wu’s project secured the leading award at the Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge in October. Over several months, he investigated whether the Miura fold’s strength-to-weight ratio could help improve deployable structures for emergency use.

In practical terms, Wu assessed the weight the Miura fold could support using various paper types, parallelogram heights, parallelogram widths and parallelogram angles.

This article was first published by Business Insider.

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