New origami pattern discovered at BYU could have applications in space travel
Aug 22, 2025, 6:00 AM
Engineering students and their professor demonstrate a new class of origami that could have applications in space travel, consumer goods and more. (BYU Photo)
(BYU Photo)
PROVO — The newest style of origami – the art of paper folding – has come from a student at BYU.
Kelvin Wang created this new origami style as part of his work in the engineering department at BYU, where they’re studying how origami patterns can be used for things like solar panels and antennas. Larry Howell is Wang’s mechanical engineering professor.
“So we’re always looking for new origami patterns or patterns from the origami community to do our engineering work. And here, this very bright student, Kelvin Wong, had some ideas of some patterns. And they looked really good and very promising,” Howell said. “And I’ve not seen anything like it, which was kind of exciting, that hey, this can help us in our engineering, but it also appears to be a new class of origami.”
Howell said they showed the new patterns to origami experts, who confirmed that it was a new class of origami with new capabilities.
The professor said they’re already looking at some applications for NASA.
“So they have some really some amazing things that can be done with this pattern. For example, we have things that need to be compact in one state and then deploy out be large,” Howell said. “And so we’ve done like deployable solar panels. This could be an application there. Right now, we’re working with NASA on a deployable space telescope.”
But he says the possibilities don’t end there.
“There’s also some potential consumer product applications. So one of those is actually a very compact container. So this can be made out of a food-grade material, and it can be very compact, really, really flat, but then fold out and to be either a big container that can hold fluid or just something that’s beautiful that can also hold things,” Howell said.
He said his team has demonstrated making the pattern out of multiple materials, including plastic, Tyvek and aluminum, which he says opens the door to even more applications.
“So in addition to the containers and space applications, then we hope that as people see this and then say, ‘Hey, you know what, here’s a place where we can use that in our company and it could be new products that we haven’t yet anticipated,” Howell said.
Wang has named this new style of origami Bloom Patterns because when they open up, it looks like a flower blooming.
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