10/15/18

An assistant at the morphing matter lab drops a few pieces of flat dry pasta into a pot of boiling water. In a few minutes, these rigid flat strips will turn into soft spiral shapes called fusilli that can hold a lot of tasty sauce.

Packaging dry pasta in flat form saves a lot of space and packing material. The same goes for other morphing materials.

For example, you can have all your furniture pieces flat impact, shipped home, plug it into the wall. With the heat from the electricity, you can trigger to self-assemble into the right table or chair you want.

The labs director, assistant professor Lining Yao, says making the material bent into a certain shape requires learning about its physical properties. We are programming some pre-strain within the thermoplastic network on a micro scale.

Even more interesting are materials that may be able to change shape back and forth like this morphing paper. For example, a garment that can respond to your sweat, and automatically open and close up flaps on the back to keep your body cool or warm.

The question is how expensive would it be to manufacture such materials. We try by the end of the project to figure out a very easy recipe, both software and hardware, to make it very available for the users we targeted towards.

Yao says researchers are still learning how to control different morphing materials, but shape changing pasta may be the first to find its way to customers. George Putic VOA news Pittsburgh.