Focus on Arts and Ecology

Yet there’s a long list of mask complaints. Some flat coverings quickly turn into moist bits of cloth pressed across your face. Others can lead to a feeling of suffocation, even though cloth and medical masks allow plenty of oxygen through for healthy adults. And while all masks afford some level of viral protection, some are more effective than others. Origami holds promise to help alleviate many of these woes.

The first major hurdle for origami mask designs is material. The mask isn’t a simple sieve. Instead, the material is more like a maze for particles—the more chances the particles have to run into a wall, the better the filter works. Two or three layers are better than one, and materials with less orderly structures, like the non-woven polypropylene of an N95 mask, make better filters. But most common fabrics are no good for origami, which requires rigidity in order to hold folds.

One potential solution is a polypropylene material commonly used in hospitals to wrap surgical instruments, explains Shu Yang, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. She and her colleagues turned to this wrap during the early days of the pandemic when protective gear was running short.

A study of one common wrap called Halyard H300 suggested that three layers of the material could achieve a filter efficiency close to N95 masks, the gold standard for filtration, which block at least 95 percent of 0.3-micron particles and even increase in efficiency for both larger and smaller particulates. What’s more, the wrap is readily available in large sheets and is stiff enough to hold folds. Last spring, Yang and her colleagues delivered 10,000 origami masks made of the wrap to the University of Pennsylvania's medical school in case of shortages.

Another solution for holding a crease is creating an outer skeleton of stiff material. Air99's Airgami mask, for example, is made of a flexible N95-grade filter fused with a more rigid and foldable layer. Since the outer structure doesn't allow air to pass through, it's punched with holes so air can reach the filter layer. And tests suggest that these materials can be sanitized with heat and reused multiple times.

Other materials that are more readily available to the public can also be effective for some folded mask designs, says Jonathan Realmuto, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Irvine. For example, non-fiberglass MERV-13 filters, which are commonly used for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems, are particularly effective and available at most hardware stores.

Finding the right material is just the first step of crafting an effective mask. “It doesn’t matter how good the filter is if you don’t have a good fit,” says John Volckens of Colorado State University, who led an intensive testing effort to document the filtration efficiencies for an array of materials.

When improperly designed or worn, masks can have gaps around the nose or cheeks, allowing entry and exit points for potentially virus-laden particles to flow—and closing these gaps is where origami truly shines.

Origami techniques are already central to many masks on the market today, Volckens notes. 3M’s VFlex, for example, combines folding with heat welding to hold the material together, creating a more comfortable version of an N95. But N95s are not yet widely available, as U.S. supplies are still reeling from skyrocketed demand. The U.S. is the world's largest importer of face masks—and continued failures of the federal government to scale up U.S. mask production have, in part, driven lingering shortages.

The dire need for more masks has inspired a variety of origami designs, from masks that anyone can make at home to designs that challenge everyone but the most expert of folders.

Features as simple as changing the angles of the pleats of common surgical masks can dramatically improve fit. This idea is at the heart of Jiangmei Wu’s folded mask design. Wu, an origami artist and associate professor of interior design at Indiana University, started experimenting with mask patterns after receiving a call from her brother in Hong Kong as the coronavirus started taking hold in January 2020.