Seaweed aquaculture has long been recognized as a nature-based climate solution, with macroalgae contributing roughly 1.5 petagrams of carbon to global annual net primary production and farm sediments burying about 1.87 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per hectare per year—twice the rate of adjacent non-farmed areas. However, expanding seaweed farming into the open ocean has been stymied by strong currents that prevent stable attachment and by dilute nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, and dissolved iron. Existing platforms either rely on scarce offshore infrastructure or cannot regulate local flow, leaving vast ocean areas unsuitable for large-scale cultivation.
Now, researchers at Zhejiang University, with collaborators at Guizhou University and the Ningbo Innovation Center, have published a study online on 28 September 2026 in Environmental Science and Ecotechnology describing a modular, origami-inspired system that could overcome these barriers. The Seaweed Origami-inspired Aquaculture System (Seaweed OAS) uses a shell-core structure to slow local flow, provide attachment surfaces, and store slow-release nutrients. The design is assembled from 12 variant pentagonal units into a dodecahedron-like shell, each module combining an origami-inspired shell, an internal nutrient space, a central buoyancy ball, and connection seats. The folding pattern, inspired by the traditional Chinese huiwen (fret) pattern, is controlled by a dimensionless scaling ratio, with an optimal single-unit design at φ = 0.36.
In computational fluid dynamics simulations, a single unit under 2.0 m s⁻¹ currents produced 2,607.7 cm³ of suitable growth volume—where streamwise velocity is ≤0.5 m s⁻¹—and the best result reached 2,791.6 cm³, 17 times larger than a spherical reference. Optimized six-unit arrays with 0.35 m spacing increased per-unit suitable volume 2.1-fold, to 5,535.1 cm³ per unit. Laboratory compression tests showed a minimum peak load of 11,693 N against a predicted peak drag of 39.9 N, yielding a safety factor of 293. Lake and open-ocean trials in the Philippine Trench region confirmed the system remained afloat and stable, even during wave impacts. Global mapping identified 10,335 million hectares—28.5% of the global ocean—as potentially suitable for deployment.
The implications for carbon sequestration are significant. If validated over longer deployments, the Seaweed OAS could support open-ocean seaweed cultivation for food, feed, biomaterials, and carbon sequestration. Its modular design may be deployed without existing offshore infrastructure, and connection modules with controllable degradation could eventually allow the system to break apart so carbon-rich biomass sinks to the deep ocean for long-term storage. The authors noted that cooperative wake interactions can amplify performance, with upstream units shielding downstream ones to increase suitable growth volume per unit.
However, the team cautioned that long-term cultivation outcomes, deep-ocean carbon storage, and the ecological effects of material degradation remain unverified and require field study. Siting must also account for shipping lanes, ice cover, temperature, nutrient ratios, flow speed, and marine protected areas. The study, published with DOI 10.1016/j.ese.2026.100769, calls for long-term offshore trials to quantify seaweed growth, structural durability, material ecotoxicity, and the fate and persistence of sequestered carbon. As the world seeks scalable climate solutions, this origami-inspired approach offers a promising route to harness the open ocean's vast potential for carbon sequestration, though further research is essential to realize its full promise.
