- Y-zipper is a 3D-printed zipper in three sizes
- Is flexible when zipped up but stiff when zipped up
- The 40-year-old concept was brought to light by researchers using software and a 3D printer
Let’s make zippers interesting again. Right now they’re just part of your coat, pants or fashionable bag, but what if a zipper could serve as the frame for a cast on your broken leg or help you build a tent in a minute? It’s the kind of zipper we could all get behind, and apparently it exists as something called a Y zipper.
Y-zipper is the realization of a 40-year-old design dream in the real world. Forty years ago, former Polaroid engineer and current MIT professor William Freedman, PhD, envisioned a three-sided zipper. It would be like a traditional zipper in that it would have pieces that lock together to form a strong bond, but by adding a third side and zipping them together, it could create a potentially rigid structure that could be zipped out to return to a flexible shape.
According to a report in MIT’s News Journal, Dr. However, Freeman’s design was rejected in 1985 by a prestigious design competition.
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In the intervening years, new materials and 3D printing came along, making it possible to create automated assembly and revive the Y-zipper idea.
A second chance for this innovative Y-zip
Look at
In a project led by MIT postdoc and CSAIL researcher Jiaji Li, they created a 3D printable version of the Y zipper. Each zipper begins as a design on the computer, where Li and his team connect triangular and zipperable primates, bending and curving them as they please.
Once they have a Y-zip rigid design, they divide it into three printable flat zipper panels. Then they print them out, peel them off the printing table and use a specially designed slider to fuse them together. The three sections each feed into one of three slots, and just like the slider on your traditional zipper, when you pull the three pieces through this slider, they lock together and come out as a rigid shape on the other side. This shape can be a bar, a curve, or even a corkscrew (it all depends on how each page was printed and the angles inside). When you move the pieces back through the slider or flip the slider, the three pieces fall apart as
It looks cool, but there are even sexier and more practical uses.
In an MIT-produced video, we see how the team designed a Y-zipper hand brace. They started on the computer with CAD software, created a rigid shape that would curve around the hand, and in the application, pulled it apart into three flat zippered pieces that would eventually fit together.
On the 3D printer, they printed a flat section of a fabric glove that, when worn, was still completely flexible. The researchers then used a small slider to zip the two remaining pages together. The resulting Y-zipper is a glove with a rigid hoop. Just imagine how this could be used on e.g. a full cast for a broken leg.
In another part of the video, a small robot has four Y-zip legs that slide in and out so it can walk under obstacles. Inside the robot, four sliders allow the flexible parts to roll back into the robot’s body.
Finally, the Y-zipper is used as a frame for a tent. The four flexible sides are sewn on the four seams, and when the two sides are zipped onto the spine, each becomes firm and fully supports the tent frame. And if you’re particularly lazy, apparently you can attach a small actuator to the slider and it will zip up the sections for you. In the video, this reduced the time it takes to raise the tent to one minute. Imagine having to light a fire all the time.
The team is still working on mass-producing the materials and production, but it seems pretty likely that one day we’ll see Y-zips everywhere, except maybe on your fly.
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