Elegant mathematics bending the future of design
(Credit: EPFL)
August 14, 2025 – Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, EPFL) have developed a new method for designing complex, curved three-dimensional shapes using flat materials such as paper, aluminum sheets, or plastic. The approach combines creative thinking with an innovative computer algorithm. The result is so-called C-Tubes: a new way to construct curved, tubular structures from flat strips that bend without stretching or creasing. The system was developed by researchers at the Geometric Computing Laboratory (GCM), part of EPFL.
The study, C-Tubes: Design and Optimization of Tubular Structures Composed of Developable Strips, was presented this week at the ACM SIGGRAPH 2025 conference and received an honorable mention for Best Paper.
