Water Lilies by Dana from israel

In collaboration with professor Eran Sharon from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, I have recently completed a project entitled ‘Lilies’. ‘Lilies’ indexes sets of prototypical flexible ‘living’ patterns consisting of cotton and a responsive active material which changes shape according to drops or increases in temperature, thus resembling natural structures like flowers and floral parts. Temperature changes make the gel contract under the constraints imposed by the pattern, and as a result the sheet warps into a three-dimensional shape.

Working in the lab, we’ve examined the relationship between shape and material through a method that converts a two-dimensional object into a three-dimensional structure. Our exciting and fruitful interaction proved that we can join our different backgrounds in design, botany and physics into a new concept: the “Bio-Inspired Hybrid Textile” (BIHT). The BIHT is a new approach to building soft, shape-transforming sheets. It extends the notion of a fabric, making it closer to the active plant tissue. The sheet is easy to manufacture and can be implemented in many different materials for different purposes.

The cotton is a passive material, which is easily bent, but resists stretching. The responsive gel is a soft material, made of a polymer network and water. When changing environmental conditions homogeneous gel undergoes large (~1000%) volume changes. These changes are reversible and can be induced by different environmental stimuli. We used a N IsoPropylAcrylamide (NIPA) gel, which shrinks (or swells) in water as the temperature increases above (or decreases below) ~350 C.