Muscle Wire

[Kevin Sevcik]

Originally Posted by Al Skierkiewicz

60 watts for the largest size is a tough specification. Hard to get rid of the heat or supply the current but I am sure there are some interesting uses.

The specification is 60W/m, so you're only dumping that much power if you're using a meter of the wire. The specs actually recommend a supply current of 2.75A for the largest wire, and 8Ω/m resistance. So on an FRC robot, you'd actually be limited to about .5m at most between terminals unless you were getting fancy with multiple sources or grounds on the wire. Which means you'd be looking at 30W dissipation, which is paltry compared to most of our motors. All the other flavors have other length limits, but they all work out to around .5m with a 12V supply.

I think the real trick to using this stuff would be properly controlling the current in the short segments you'd be likely to use on a robot. For a 10cm segment of the thick stuff, you'd want to hold 2.2V RMS to heat it properly. That works out to a 3.3% duty cycle, which is the minimum duty cycle on a Victor, and pretty darned small on a jaguar.

[Qbranch]

Maybe it has troubles... but still. This is the coolest thing I've seen since the giant crushing thing in the materials testing lab!

It looks like magic when you watch the videos... I think I may have to work a couple extra hours and drop some money on a spool of this stuff... it's just too darn cool not to play around with.

I take it it's actuation is entirely silent?

Amazing stuff. I'm in awe at the stuff material scientists come up with...

-q

[JesseK]

Originally Posted by Qbranch

Amazing stuff. I'm in awe at the stuff material scientists come up with...

-q

This one is even better! If I remember correctly, nitinol was an accidental discovery in a naval research program of the 60's.