At a certain trigger temperature, the coils contract to their “remembered” form, such as a fully coiled spring, tightening the cuff in the process. The team incorporated the coils in a tourniquet-like cuff, and applied a current to generate heat. The coils are made from a shape-memory alloy (SMA) - a type of material that “remembers” an engineered shape and, when bent or deformed, can spring back to this shape when heated. Now MIT researchers are one step closer to engineering such an active, “second-skin” spacesuit: Dava Newman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at MIT, and her colleagues have engineered active compression garments that incorporate small, springlike coils that contract in response to heat. To take the suit off, she would only have to apply modest force, returning the suit to its looser form. The skintight, pressurized suit would not only support the astronaut, but would give her much more freedom to move during planetary exploration.
She would then plug in to a spacecraft’s power supply, triggering the coils to contract and essentially shrink-wrap the garment around her body. For future astronauts, the process of suiting up may go something like this: Instead of climbing into a conventional, bulky, gas-pressurized suit, an astronaut may don a lightweight, stretchy garment, lined with tiny, musclelike coils.
0 kommentar(er)
