Comments on: Incredible Memory Metal

By: DaviDC.

DaviDC. — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 21:37:52 +0000

Twenty five years ago this technology was going to bring about all sorts of new & useful things. Where are they?

By: South African/Serbian

South African/Serbian — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 12:57:56 +0000

That sucks dude! :(

By: David Sutton

David Sutton — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 23:09:41 +0000

I designed an engine made from a long nitinol spring wrapped around two pulleys 28 years ago only to find out it was patented while I was building it. ( by someone I had discussed my thoughts to 0

By: Harry Roberts

Harry Roberts — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 16:05:10 +0000

I’d hazard a guess at it not being strong enough to make cars from. An alloy which can be bent so easily probably isn’t suited to housing a one tonne car travelling at 70mph…

By: Vicki

Vicki — Tue, 20 May 2008 04:02:11 +0000

They use stuff like this in braces. If the wire in the braces bends, it goes back to shape under hot water. Must have something to do with how the braces work :)

By: Frank the SciencePunk

Frank the SciencePunk — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 08:52:32 +0000

LOL!

By: Cyanide

Cyanide — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 01:20:22 +0000

I work in an opticians, this stuff is awesome.

Once when I was showing a customer the memory metal frames, I bent them and they snapped at the bridge =/

He still bought them though =]

By: Andrew

Andrew — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 05:47:39 +0000

@20 &29:

This stuff is used in a few magic tricks, where the wire “mysteriously” bends into a prediction.

By: Patriot

Patriot — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 10:54:37 +0000

#20,
The site this is from is Grand Illusions, yes, but there IS such a material, with the mentioned properties. Look up Google before pointing out useless details.

#28
The government denies anything being found at Rosewell.
Also the only witnesses are a baffled farmer, who described it was sheet metal.
So that’s out of the question.

By: Lorenzo

Lorenzo — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 11:33:48 +0000

Hi,

I saw many talking about making a car out of this stuff.

Here are the reasons that would make this difficult:
1.currently car building processes are all cold process of bending and shaping the pieces of metal that make up the car (witch are afterwards soldiered together) to build a car with the amount of heat required would be more expensive than to make a new car.
2. this material is very sensitive to thermal dilatation, you might end up having cracks in your car after a cold winter or warm summer if there are any even minimum design or assembly flaws.
3.this material is expensive to extract and produce, and there is not so much around as iron or alluminium
4.this alloy is very hard to soldier, increasing production cost (compared to iron witch can be assembled very easily)

And here is why it would be a bad idea:
1.when you get in to an accident a lot of dynamic power is absorbed by the car chassis when it bends and crushes, many cars are designed to absorb as much of this by crushing and bending as much as possible to reduce shock on the passengers, this alloy is far too rigid to accomplish this, and a whole lot more energy would end up impacting on the passengers.
2.figure this, a person gets in a car wreck and he is stuck inside the car with all the car bent and warped around him, and now a small spark ignites some fuel that was spilled (not much just enough to make a small fire) that allows the metal to reach “memory temperature”, then the metal bends back and wound even further the passenger.

These of course are only speculations as no such car has ever been built, and i’m not excluding that some of these issues might be solved trough design.