From self-assembling furniture to curving racing car wings, seven GIFs that show the future of 4D printing

Warping wood

While wood has historically been a tricky material to bend into shape, requiring expertise and complex steaming equipment, new techniques are overcoming these limitations.

The Self-Assembly Lab and its partners at the Institute for Computational Design at the University of Stuttgart have found ways of inducing specially-treated wood composite to bend itself into preset shapes.

In experiments the researchers used water to trigger the wood to reshape itself.

The MIT lab suggests this property could be useful to allow items built from wood composites to adapt to extreme environmental conditions.

Image: Self-Assembly Lab, MIT, Christophe Guberan, Erik Demaine, Autodesk Inc

Flexible fiber

Carbon fiber is known for its stiffness, high-tensile strength and light weight.

While these characteristics make the material suited to a wide range of applications, it also makes carbon fiber difficult to mould into curved shapes.

However, the MIT lab and its partners found a way to make carbon fiber-based materials bend more easily.

The lab and its partners printed active material onto cured, flexible carbon fiber. Heating the material causes it to change its shape.

The bendable carbon fiber was used to form a wing on the Briggs Automotive Company (BAC) Morphing Supercar and for a flap inside an Airbus plane engine.

The novel approach brings practical benefits. By making a car wing from such a malleable substance, BAC is able tune the aerodynamic performance of its Morphing Supercar.

Image: Self-Assembly Lab, MIT, Briggs Automotive Company, Carbitex LLC, Autodesk Inc

Tumultuous textiles

Traditionally, stretching fabric over a solid frame, for instance when building furniture, required molding and purpose-built machinary.

The Self-Assembly Lab and its partners have been experimenting with 3D printing onto stretched fabric and then releasing that fabric to let it form itself into new shapes.

The pattern and the thickness of the 3D printed layers can be altered to change the shape the fabric forms when relaxed.

Image: Self-Assembly Lab, MIT, Christophe Guberan, Erik Demaine, Autodesk Inc

Writing the future

Here a strand fold itself into the letters MIT when placed into water.

It is a demonstration of how printed materials can be treated to arrange themselves into specific shapes.

One potential use the lab forsees for materials able to exhibit such "robotics-like behaviour", without the need for complex electro-mechanical devices, is to give products and clothes the ability to react to user needs and the environment.

Image: Self-Assembly Lab, MIT, Stratasys

Self-building cube

This flat arrangement of 2D squares folds itself into a cube.

Image: Self-Assembly Lab, MIT, Stratasys

3D printing goes full circle

This flat circle warps itself to raise itself up when placed in water.

Image: Self-Assembly Lab, MIT, Stratasys

Pop-up electronics

MIT's Self-Assembly Lab isn't the only research centre experimenting with materials that can reshape themselves.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has developed a similar technique for generating 3D circuits that could underpin new medical implants, solar cells and other electronics.

The team devised a process for transforming 2D micro- and nano-structures into 3D, using concepts they described as similar to those used to create children's 3D pop-up books.

Image: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Creative circuits

The process could allow complex 3D structures to be built using materials only a few microns thick. Because the process can be used to create silicon structures, it could be used to help make circuitry for range of electronic devices - from battery anodes, to solar cells, and biomedical devices.

Researchers hope the structures will have a use in microelectromechanical components, photonics and optoelectronics and metamaterials.

Image: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Under pressure

The team at Illinois claim this method bypasses some of the constraints on existing methods for building 3D structures at this scale, which limits the classes of materials that can be used and the complexity of the geometries that can be built.

The technique, called compressive buckling, works by printing a 2D structure onto a layer of material that has been compressed. The 2D printed structure is bound to the compressed substrate at several points and when the substrate is released and expands back into its original shape, the 2D structure sat on top rises up into a 3D form.

See the rest of the images of the Illinois university's work here.

Image: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign