With a just bit of heat, the flat strip of rubbery material folds itself into an origami swan. But the trick's not over yet, because that very same rubbery strip can be taught a new transformations. It stays fixed as a swan, and then, with another blast of heat, transforms into an origami windmill. Then it's windmill to boat, and boat to fan, and on and on. Even when stretched, twisted, and pulled, the material's reprogramming ability goes on indefinitely.

"You can manipulate the shape of this material as many times as you want."

A team of materials scientists at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China have just developed a self-folding material unlike any other—the first that can be indefinitely reprogrammed without being melted down. The material, a novel type of shape memory polymer, can be creased and folded into new, permanent shapes without wearing out. From those permanent shapes, anything from a simple fold to a complex origami windmill, the material can also be taught to deform into new temporary shapes with a blast of heat. The research is outlined today in the journal Science Advances.

"You can manipulate the shape of this material, either its permanent or temporary position, as many times as you want," says Tao Xie, a materials scientist who led the research team.

Xie's new material is able to fold and refold without wearing out thanks to the molecular processes underlying his rubber-like shape memory polymer. Here are the basics: Many other self-folding shape memory polymers work thanks to connections, known as bonds, between molecules that change and adjust with heat, light, or some other external stimuli. That means, for example, at a low temperature the bonds connect in one way, and at a high temperature the bonds connect a different way. To our eyes, those different sets of bonds look like different shapes. But unless you melt down your material, you have little hope of totally resetting the original connections of all of those bonds—in other words, reprogramming the material's permanent shape.

Shape manipulation via thermally distinct elasticity and plasticity. (A) Smart origami structures. (B) Smart kirigami structure. Qian Zhao and Tao Xie

But Xie's material does not rely on reversible bonds. Rather, the material owes its shape-changing nature to the elastic properties of the long, squiggly molecules themselves. The difference is that while the molecules can be taught to fix or freeze into various postures (all done with nothing more than physical folding and heating), at no point does Xie have to rearrange how all the molecules connect.

Xie admits that the push behind developing this new material was not entirely for fulfilling new practical applications. "We were simply asking ourselves, how else can we engineer these shape memory polymers to do thing that are beyond what we even imagine is possible," he says. Nonetheless, Xie says his material's refoldability may make it alluring to engineers designing reusable biomedical devices.

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