- The Y zipper is a 3D printed three size zipper
- Is flexible when unzipped but stiff when zipped
- This 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 act as a 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 under the name Y-zipper.
Y-zipper is the concrete realization of a 40-year-old design dream. Forty years ago, William Freedman, PhD, a former Polaroid engineer and current professor at MIT, envisioned a three-sided zipper. It would be like a traditional zipper in that it would have pieces that fit 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 unzipped back into a flexible shape.
However, according to an article in MIT’s News Journal, Dr. Freeman’s project was rejected in 1985 by a prestigious design competition.
Article continues below
In the years that followed, new materials and 3D printing arrived, making it possible to create automated assembly and revive the idea of the Y-zipper.
A second chance for this innovative Y-zipper
Look on it
In a project led by Jiaji Li, a postdoctoral fellow at MIT and researcher at CSAIL, they created a 3D printable version of the Y-zipper. Each zipper begins with a design on the computer where Li and his team connect triangular and zippable primitives, bending and curving them as desired.
Once they have the rigid design of a Y zipper, they break it down into three printable flat zipper panels. Then they print them, peel them off the print table, and use a custom-designed slider to weave them together. The three sections are each fed into one of three slots and, like the slider on your traditional zipper, when you pull the three pieces through that slider, they lock together and come out in a rigid form on the other side. This shape can be a rod, a curve, or even a corkscrew (it all depends on how each side was printed and the angles contained within). When you move the pieces across the slider or invert the slider, the three pieces will cascade apart like
It sounds cool, but there are even sexier and more practical applications.
In a video produced by MIT, we see how the team designed a Y-zipper hand splint. They started on the computer with CAD software, creating a rigid shape that curved around the hand and, in the application, separated it into three flat zipper pieces that would eventually fit together.
On the 3D printer, they printed a flat section on a fabric glove that, when worn, was still completely flexible. The researchers then used a small slider to connect the two remaining sides. The resulting Y-zipper is a glove with a stiff brace. Imagine how this could be used, for example, on a full body cast for a broken leg.
In another part of the video, a small robot has four Y-zippered legs that slide in and out, allowing it to walk under obstacles. Inside the robot, four sliders allow flexible parts to wrap around the robot body.
Finally, the Y-zipper serves as a frame for a tent. The four flexible sides are sewn on all four seams, and when both sides are zipped over the spines, each becomes firm and fully supports the tent frame. And if you’re particularly lazy, you can apparently attach a small actuator to the slider, and it will close the sections for you. In the video, this reduced the time it took to set up the tent to one minute. Imagine all the time it will take to start a campfire.
The team is still working on mass-producing materials and production, but it seems highly likely that one day we’ll see Y-zippers everywhere except maybe on your fly.
Follow TechRadar on Google News And add us as your favorite source to get our news, reviews and expert opinions in your feeds.
