Material of the Week #4: Nitinol
Bend or deform, it springs back to its original shape!
Nitinol is a metal alloy made of nickel and titanium. The cool thing about the alloy is that if you bend or deform it, by heating it back, the material will return to its original shape. Nitinol can also flex dramatically without permanent damage. The material is made by melting nickel and titanium together in a precise fifty-fifty ratio.
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Nitinol surfaces in medical devices, consumer goods, along with engineering and aerospace. Health-wise, it can be used to expand inside arteries through body heat. In your everyday life, the material is used for flexible eyeglass frames and phone camera optical image stabilization. In the engineering field, nitinol can be applied for robotic actuators, vibration dampeners, etc.
Something I found cool while researching nitinol was how it can remember its shape, as it doesn’t appear much in other materials. I think the most exciting future use could be the involvement within medical tools such as stents. As someone who’s into aviation, the idea of wings or parts flexing mid-flight and shaping back is really interesting to me now knowing what material is the reason for that.
