[HN Gopher] Kirigami-inspired parachute falls on target
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Kirigami-inspired parachute falls on target
Author : sohkamyung
Score : 83 points
Date : 2025-10-02 12:54 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (physicsworld.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (physicsworld.com)
| ugh123 wrote:
| Linked paper:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09515-9.epdf
| twp wrote:
| This is really cool and innovative thinking, but anything
| aerodynamic does not scale linearly. It's really easy to make
| something light fall slowly. Baby spiders use "ballooning" -- a
| single thread -- to fall so slowly that they can travel far in
| thermal updrafts.
|
| What's missing here is any evidence that the same cool parachutes
| will work on anything of significant mass, e.g. a parcel weighing
| 2kg or an average human weighing 80kg.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| The tested it with a standard size waterbottle, so you know it
| works fine for 0.8 kg paloads.
| observationist wrote:
| Depending on the use case, a hot-air balloon sized parachute to
| safely drop a person might be perfectly acceptable.
|
| It looks like adding flexible ailerons or whatever they'd be
| called could give a big advantage in precision landing, with
| slower forward/sideways speeds but much better control.
|
| Making it modular, with interlocking but separate parts, might
| make great sense for repairability and safety for skydiving?
| From the little I know of the sport, things tend to fail
| catastrophically, going from perfect condition to total
| disaster without a whole lot of graduated steps in between. I
| also wonder if there's some utility in paramotoring - multiple
| kirigami stabilizers, maybe, with a central parafoil, or one
| big kirigami rig with the fan blowing straight up its skirt?
|
| This is awesome research. Paper drone-delivery parachutes are
| definitely a use case, but maybe some of the more dangerous
| flying sports could be made much safer, as well.
|
| edit: Apparently no, 100 meter radius kirigami chute would be
| needed for a single person parachute, not exactly practical.
| Apparently it's just really, really good at ensuring things
| drop straight down with a lot of drag.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Spider ballooning is an interesting phenomena. I also assumed
| that the spider is just falling a bit slower than the air is
| rising, due to convection. However some people think there is
| also a strong electrostatic component to spider ballooning. I'm
| not sure how that works once the spider is well clear of the
| ground though.
| drpixie wrote:
| >> does not scale linearly
|
| It looks like it depends on the stiffness of the material
| (paper), so scaling it up to human (or bigger) sized will come
| with "interesting" challenges :(
| aaroninsf wrote:
| Related work that his lab was doing when I got to take a seminar
| with him at IU:
| https://gwern.net/doc/design/typography/1993-mcgraw.pdf
|
| Gary was one of the TAs in the class. The non-reducibility of
| letterforms has remained a fascination--I always did like the
| (computational) linguistics corner of cognitive science!
| Jtsummers wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45495711 - I think you
| meant to comment on this one.
| baxtr wrote:
| The journal Nature (where the original article was published) has
| a video about that parachute:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rrDW6YIbXI
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| I had to wonder if Nature (the Mother, not the journal) had
| first created anything similar, because she always does.
|
| One answer is a dandelion seed. Not exactly the same, but a
| dandelion seed is about 85%+ "porous" - the pores here being
| the space between the spindles, not actual holes per se. And it
| turns out that high porosity is critical to stabilizing the
| wake turbulence not unlike what is described in the Nature
| video. https://sites.nd.edu/biomechanics-in-the-
| wild/2021/06/01/inn...
|
| A learning that kirigami parachute researches might apply: The
| dandelion pappus is less porous near the center and becomes
| more porous toward the outer edge. A lower porosity near the
| central hub can increase shear flow, helping to detach and
| strengthen the vortex
|
| Furthermore, spiders which have been known to "balloon" on the
| wind even across entire oceans use multiple strands of silk
| which are negatively charged to repel each other, thus forming
| some of the same gaps that are seen in a dandelion pappus, with
| similar aerodynamic benefits.
| https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.105.0...
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Is that really Nature's channel? It sucks that I have to ask,
| but I just ran across that video (and channel) on the weekend.
| I have a new policy where I don't trust videos to not be AI
| slop when they don't have a real, on screen presenter. This one
| didn't, but it also didn't really feel like AI slop, but it
| could have been stolen content since that is very common
| nowadays because it goes unpunished.
| ashton314 wrote:
| Regretting my choice to do a PhD in CS instead of whatever this
| cool thing is...
| golem14 wrote:
| your PhD probably gives you the wherewithal to do the cool
| things now or after a few years of work ...
| ashton314 wrote:
| [delayed]
| fallingmeat wrote:
| now swoop it!
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Modern parachutes can be packed relatively small and open quite
| quickly. Not sure how you would pack one of these parachutes,
| especially if they are made from a relatively stiff plastic.
| tempestn wrote:
| It comes as a flat disc. For some applications that might be
| more convenient packaging than traditional parachutes.
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