Origami bladder
A plastic bladder folded into an origami shape can stand up to cryogenic temperatures. (WSU Photo)

Build a better fuel tank, and the space industry will beat a path to your door. At least that’s what Washington State University researchers are hoping after they harnessed the ancient art of origami to develop a foldable fuel bladder that stands up to cryogenic temperatures.

Graduate student Kjell Westra, engineering professor Jake Leachman and their colleagues at WSU’s Hydrogen Properties for Energy Research Laboratory, or HYPER Lab, describe their design in the journal Cryogenics. Their research addresses a longstanding challenge in rocket science: How can you store and pump super-chilled propellants like liquid hydrogen more efficiently?

“Folks have been trying to make bags for rocket fuel for a long time,” Leachman said today in a news release. “We currently don’t do large, long-duration trips because we can’t store fuel long enough in space.”

During the early days of the space effort, engineers tried to develop balloon-style bladders for managing the storage and flow of liquid hydrogen, Unfortunately, such bladders were prone to shatter or leak when they were squeezed. The hardiest designs could survive only five cycles of squeezing and relaxing.

Current systems use metal plates and surface tension to manage fuels, but researchers are still searching for more efficient systems.

When the WSU researchers looked through the literature, they came across research that described the development of a bellows that took advantage of origami, the Japanese art of paper-folding. The research discussed applications relating to medical stents, or even deployable solar sails for spaceflight — but Westra and his colleagues adapted the design for rocket fuel bladders.

“The best solutions are the ones that are already ready-made and that you can then transfer to what you’re working on,” Westra explained.

It took a few tries — and some guidance from a YouTube video — to figure out how to fold thin sheets of plastic into the desired configuration. Once Westra mastered the technique, he tested the origami bellows in a vat of liquid nitrogen cooled to a temperature of about 77 Kelvin (320 degrees below zero Fahrenheit).

The researchers hoped that the origami folds would spread out the stresses on the plastic material, making it less likely to tear — and their hopes were borne out by the experiments. Their intricately folded bladder could be squeezed at least 100 times under cryogenic conditions without breaking or leaking.

“We think we’ve solved a key problem that was holding everybody back,” Leachman said. Now the researchers are getting set to conduct similar experiments with liquid hydrogen, which has to be kept at even colder temperatures — 20 Kelvin, or 423 degrees below zero F.

Westra has been awarded a NASA graduate fellowship to keep working on the project. And that’s not all: The work has received funding from the Joint Center for Aerospace Technology Innovation, an economic development initiative backed by Washington state — as well as from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture. “Kjell’s success is a perfect example of great WSU students studying what’s out there, and then being in the right place at the right time to make it happen,” Leachman said.

In addition to Westra and Leachman, the authors of the Cryogenics study, “Compliant Polymer Origami Bellows in Cryogenics,” include Francis Dunne, Stasia Kulsa and Mathew Hunt.

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