Miles Wu

And the way these parallelograms are arranged, they're able to fold down to an extremely compact size in one smooth motion.

And this makes MirrorOrient an efficient deployable structure that's even been used to fold a solar array that was sent into space.

And last year, I was also reading the news about natural disasters like Hurricane Helene.

And I saw so many people displaced.

and it made me wonder if mirror ori could be used to improve emergency deployable shelters by making them stronger and lighter.

And so for my eighth-grade science fair project, I decided to study mirror ori and how I could optimize its strength-to-weight ratio.

I started out by designing 18 different folding patterns.

These had different heights, widths and angles of the parallelograms in the pattern.

I tested each of these patterns across three different paper weights, and each of those variations twice.

for a total of 108 Miura Ori that I folded and tested.

And for each of these Miura Ori, I wanted to see not only how much weight they could hold, but also how many times their own weight they could hold.

And so for two months, I transformed my family's small New York City apartment into my testing lab with Miura Ori all over the place.

When I was first starting out, I grabbed basically every heavy book and item, and I stacked them on top of the Mirror Ori.

But I quickly realized I didn't actually have enough weights to accurately test the models.

And so I asked my parents to buy some really heavy exercise weights.

250 hours later, and after a lot of heavy lifting, I found that the Mirror Ori with the smallest and least acutely angled panels, made out of the lightest paper,

had the greatest strength-to-weight ratio.

The strongest pattern held almost 200 pounds, and another lighter version held more than 10,000 times its own weight.

I found that the stronger patterns were more compact, and they also created truss-like structures that were able to distribute pressure evenly.

It's amazing that something can be so strong and yet so lightweight at the same time, and it's exciting to think about what potential applications a fold like this could have