{"id":186985,"date":"2025-10-03T08:07:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-03T08:07:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/186985\/"},"modified":"2025-10-03T08:07:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-03T08:07:09","slug":"scientists-reinvent-parachutes-using-japanese-paper-cutting-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/186985\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientists Reinvent Parachutes Using Japanese Paper-Cutting Art"},"content":{"rendered":"

Parachutes rarely get the credit they deserve. They transform deadly freefall into a gentle descent, saving lives in war zones, rescue missions, and even humanitarian aid drops. But they come with a flaw: once released, they\u2019re at the mercy of the wind. A carefully aimed package of medicine can easily drift far off target.<\/p>\n

Now, researchers from Polytechnique Montr\u00e9al in Canada and \u00c9cole Polytechnique in France have come up with a clever twist: making parachutes more accurate by cutting them. Inspired by kirigami (the Japanese art of paper cutting<\/a>) they\u2019ve created lightweight, cheap parachutes that fall with remarkable precision.<\/p>\n

\"\" <\/a>Laser cutting of a closed-loop kirigami pattern allows a plastic sheet to adopt the shape of an inverted bell. Credit: Martin Primeau.<\/p>\n

Solving the Parachute Problem<\/p>\n

The earliest evidence for the true parachute dates back to the Renaissance period. Leonardo da Vinci made important<\/a> contributions to the design of parachutes, and by the 18th century, modern-type parachutes were already used. Kirigami is even older, being documented since the 7th century AD<\/a>. Children use it to make snowflakes out of paper, but recently, engineers have used it to create extensible structures<\/a>, flexible medical devices<\/a>, and deployable spatial structures<\/a>. But kirigami and parachutes don\u2019t seem like they\u2019d do well together.<\/p>\n

Conventional parachutes work by catching air, so slicing holes into them sounds like sabotage. But instead of altering a parachute canopy, the researchers started with a simple disc of Mylar and experimented with cut patterns.<\/p>\n

Their central challenge was to overcome the inherent instability of a falling disc. If you\u2019ve ever dropped a frisbee or a piece of paper, you\u2019ve probably seen this happen: it flutters, tumbles, and drifts unpredictably. To understand how to control this chaos, the team started by laser-cutting three different types of discs from thin Mylar sheets and dropping them from a height of 1.8 meters, each with a small 4.5-gram weight attached to its center.<\/p>\n

A plain disc, or one densely cut with concentric slits, tumbled unpredictably, just like a frisbee dropped midair. But another design, with a simpler kirigami pattern, transformed into an upside-down bell shape when weighted. Unlike its chaotic cousins, this disc stabilized instantly and dropped straight down.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne advantage of this parachute is that it quickly stabilizes and doesn\u2019t pitch, regardless of the release angle,\u201d says M\u00e9lan\u00e7on, co-author of the article. And unlike conventional parachutes, it follows a strict ballistic descent<\/a> trajectory.<\/p>\n

Putting It to the Test<\/p>\n

After landing on a promising design, the team put their kirigami parachutes through a series of increasingly realistic tests. They tested the design in a wind tunnel, in the lab, and with outdoor drops from a drone. In all instances, the kirigami parachute behaved remarkably well, comparable to a \u201cregular\u201d parachute. Furthermore, the behavior didn\u2019t seem to be size-dependent.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe parachute\u2019s behavior doesn\u2019t change even when the size of the device is augmented,\u201d says Fr\u00e9d\u00e9rick Gosselin, one of the study authors. \u201cThis suggests that it could be scaled up for larger applications.\u201d<\/p>\n

The real test, however, was precision. They dropped parachutes based on the unstable Design A, the stable Design B, and a small conventional parachute from a height of 16.6 meters (about 54 feet) onto a target below. To make it even more challenging, they released them from different initial angles: perfectly flat (0\u00b0), tilted (45\u00b0), and even completely on its side (90\u00b0).<\/p>\n

The stable Design B parachutes landed in a tight cluster, almost all of them within a meter of the bullseye, regardless of the release angle. The kirigami pattern didn\u2019t just prevent tumbling; it ensured a landing of unprecedented accuracy.<\/p>\n

For the grand finale, the team scaled up their concept to prove it could handle a meaningful payload. They fabricated a half-meter diameter parachute, attached a water bottle, and mounted it to a drone. The drone flew to an altitude of 60 meters (nearly 200 feet) and released its cargo. The kirigami parachute stabilized the water bottle as it descended, although the speed was still higher than it would have been with a regular parachute.<\/p>\n

Why This Matters<\/p>\n

This technology could be useful for purposes ranging from parcel delivery to exploration of other planets. However, the researchers say the most likely application they\u2019re looking at is humanitarian aid: deliveries of water, food, and medicine. The reason is that the parachute is extremely cheap to make. Instead of the complex sewing and assembly required for traditional parachutes, these can be mass-produced by simply laser-cutting or die-cutting a pattern onto a roll of plastic sheeting. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe made these parachutes by laser cutting, but a simple die-cutting press would also do the trick,\u201d David M\u00e9lan\u00e7on, one of the co-authors, explains. \u201cWhat\u2019s more, the parachute is seamless and is attached to the payload by a single suspension line, making it easy to use and to deploy.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the researchers say this is just the beginning. The future for this technology is wide open. The design could be optimized further by covering the kirigami slits with a soft, stretchable membrane to increase drag and slow the descent even more. By exploring more complex, asymmetric kirigami patterns, it might even be possible to program the parachute\u2019s entire trajectory, guiding it along a specific path to its target. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe want to change the patterns in order to go even further: the parachutes could descend in a spiral, for example, or glide before dropping,\u201d says M\u00e9lan\u00e7on. \u201cWe would also like to be able to vary the trajectory of descent depending on the payload, so the cargo could be sorted as the parachutes come down to Earth. This is a whole new design endeavor that opens up a multitude of possibilities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Parachutes have remained largely unchanged for centuries. They may soon get a revamp.<\/p>\n

The study was published<\/a> in Nature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Parachutes rarely get the credit they deserve. They transform deadly freefall into a gentle descent, saving lives in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":186986,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[93877,80903,93878,6811,43,68080,93879,3676,44,93880,93881,93882,41,39,42,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-186985","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-aerospace-innovation","9":"tag-biomimicry","10":"tag-drone-delivery","11":"tag-engineering","12":"tag-headlines","13":"tag-humanitarian-aid","14":"tag-kirigami","15":"tag-materials-science","16":"tag-news","17":"tag-origami-inspired-design","18":"tag-parachutes","19":"tag-polytechnique-montreal","20":"tag-top-news","21":"tag-top-stories","22":"tag-topnews","23":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186985"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186985\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/186986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}