Inexpensive, Inside-Out Parachutes Based on Kirigami
You've heard of origami, but perhaps not its cousin, kirigami. Origami involves folding paper. Kirigami goes a step further, adding cuts to the paper that allow it to form new shapes. Researchers at Canada's Polytechnique Montréal started messing around with kirigami "purely out of curiousity," to see what would happen if they cut precise patterns of slits into a parachute. Their findings were surprising. By using a lasercutter to slit a plastic sheet… …they found that when they dropped it from height, it achieved a remarkably smooth and straight downward flight. They then began testing higher drops using a drone, with a payload attached to the 'chute. The inside-out parachute works because the slits all generate a slight amount of turbulence, and these work in concert to slow the descent. Furthermore, they don't drop precipitously faster than a conventional parachute, as you might expect: We show that at low load-to-area ratios, kirigami-inspired parachutes exhibit a comparable terminal velocity to conventional ones. However, unlike conventional parachutes that require a gliding angle for vertical stability and fall at random far from a target, our kirigami-inspired parachutes always fall near the target, regardless of their initial release angle. These kinds of parachutes could limit material losses during airdropping as well as decrease manufacturing costs and complexity. The research team is also investigating how the parachutes could sort their cargo by weight. "We could have parachutes that move to one side if they are carrying water, while those carrying a lighter payload would move to the other side, so the cargo would be sorted as soon as the parachutes are released," he suggests. "The idea is to see how we can program the descent in different ways."
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- CategoryObject Culture|Object-Culture
Updated Oct 12, 2025