One day, not long ago, Maksud Rahman found himself unable to get an image out of his head: his son folding a sheet of paper this way and that, practicing the ancient art form of origami.
Rahman is an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Houston, so he’s something of a materials expert. He spends a lot of time thinking about how to make materials like ceramics more “damage-tolerant,” so when he thought about his son’s origami hobby, he got an idea.
“Can we make origami using ceramic?” he wondered.
If he succeeded in making inherently brittle ceramic materials lighter and foldable, such materials could be used for medical prosthetics and new components in the aerospace industry.
“I always tell my students, ‘It’s called research because you’ll search again and again,’” he says. You may fall short of your goal, but that just means you’re getting closer.
Around the same time, Tian “Tim” Chen, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UH, was also working with a soft material: fabric. With a lab that uses both industrial knitting machines and 3D printing to explore material behavior, Chen is exploring new applications in the worlds of tech and robotics.
“Problems we haven’t traditionally thought of as mechanical are becoming mechanical,” Chen says.
Both Chen and Rahman are stretching materials science in new directions — and delivering major innovations in the process.
“Zero to One”
There are two main ways to do research, Rahman explains. One way is to build upon work someone else has begun. The other way is to develop something new, something no one else has tried before. This is called “zero to one” research — and it’s what Rahman was doing with his origami-centric approach to ceramics.
But he was undaunted. This is the kind of work he relishes, especially because he was working alongside a talented postdoc student.
“I always see my role as a guide,” Rahman says of his approach to researching alongside students. “I provide them technical support, critical feedback and help them with each step, but I never provide the answers.”
In this case, they had a solid foundation. Rahman and his postdoc, Shajedul Hoque Thakur, found inspiration in seashells, which bear a striking structural resemblance to ceramics and polymer.
This natural architecture gives seashells both strength and toughness — a rare combination in engineered materials.
Rahman and Thakur replicated that strength-through-structure approach using 3D printers to create origami-inspired designs. And just as seashells gain toughness from their microstructure, the team focused on architectural design to improve flexibility in otherwise-brittle ceramics.
“If you have foldable ceramic origami one day, you’ll see that you can transport it easily from one-dimensional to two-dimensional and three-dimensional,” Rahman says. “You can take it from one place to another place — a big structure — because you can fold it easily.”
Of course, since this is research — searching and searching again, as Rahman puts it — he encountered several challenges. There were printer failures, polymer burnout and uneven polymer coating, all of which prevented him from creating the strong but flexible structure he sought.
His solution was to develop a vacuum-assisted polymer coating method to recreate the benefits of the soft protein layers found in seashells. This coating added a flexible, damage-tolerant layer, showing Rahman that “interdisciplinary research can lead to surprising breakthroughs.”
“We combined concepts from origami, from material science and from manufacturing, and we ended up with a very nice discovery using this ceramic,” he says. “This can reshape how we approach challenges in different scientific applications like biomedical or engineering fields.”
“This folding pattern,” he adds, “can unlock some new functionalities in most fragile materials.”
Unique Approaches to New Challenges
Chen’s work may use softer materials, but, like Rahman, Chen is broadening the scope of mechanical engineering.
“In the past, mechanical engineers worked on very fundamental and practical problems,” Chen says. Now, leaders like him tackle challenges we “didn’t know about” before, such as biomechanics and robotics.
Chen’s research fits into this new frontier by focusing on materials that are “much, much softer than what we traditionally use,” he says. “So instead of working with steel or concrete or ceramics, we try to understand the behavior of things that are inherently soft.”
His foray into fabric began when a running shoe company asked if it was possible to 3D print woven materials with varying stiffness: supportive in some parts, flexible in others. This work activated Chen’s longterm interest in exploring how knitted fabrics behave mechanically.
For his most recent project, he worked alongside collaborators at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford who have extensive experience in industrial knitting. “What we found is that the behavior of knits is largely dependent on topology — how the yarn threads through itself,” Chen says.
They used 3D printing knit patterns that mimic traditional knitting machines, and the mechanical properties matched closely, even when materials changed from cotton to synthetic polymers. This means the structure — not the material itself — controls mechanical properties such as stretch and support.
By designing a pattern, engineers can create fabrics with tailored behaviors like elasticity and reinforcement. Chen’s insight has major implications for wearable technology, soft robotics and adaptive materials that require precise mechanical control.
In quintessential UH fashion, these two professors have taken unorthodox inspiration and pioneered new pathways in mechanical engineering. Their work will unlock new possibilities far beyond their field — and it all began with a little curiosity.