Nitinol Engines (1992)
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Nitinol Engines (1992)
1–10 of 32 posts
Re: Nitinol Engines (1992)
#2"Free Energy" wackos? facepalm
Re: Nitinol Engines (1992)
#3The attached CNN video is fascinating. It seems a shame that the research seemingly abated.
Can anyone else speak to whether more work is being done into the metal or its applications?
Re: Nitinol Engines (1992)
#4"Free Energy" wackos? facepalm
Please don't do this here.
Re: Nitinol Engines (1992)
#5I balked at first glance because "free energy," but here we have a unique method for turning thermal into kinetic energy. Slightly outside the bounding box of this energy system, of course, lies the expending of more energy than what's produced to keep the hot water hot and the cold water cold.
But using natural low-grade temperature differentials as the author suggests, what might this arrangement achieve that a Stirling engine doesn't? More torque? Advantage of fewer moving parts? Novelty only?
Re: Nitinol Engines (1992)
#6"Free Energy" wackos? facepalm
Even though you can't win against thermodynamics, Nitinol wire seems fairly neat.
Re: Nitinol Engines (1992)
#7I balked at first glance because "free energy," but here we have a unique method for turning thermal into kinetic energy. Slightly outside the bounding box of this energy system, of course, lies the expending of more energy than what's produced to keep the hot water hot and the cold water cold. But using natural low-grade temperature differentials as the author suggests, what might this arrangement achieve that a Sti…
Wikipedia claims that one of the problems of Stirling engines is that they depend on the rate at which heat can be transferred to a gas. A Nitinol engine has a metal as its working object (functionally like a working fluid, just not actually fluid), so the thermal conductivity could be considerably better. The result could plausibly be higher power for a given amount of metal in use.
Re: Nitinol Engines (1992)
#8The attached CNN video is fascinating. It seems a shame that the research seemingly abated. Can anyone else speak to whether more work is being done into the metal or its applications?
I recently went to a talk at my university on microcombusters but the professor (I cant remember his name off the top of my head) was also working on small insect like drones. There were videos of nitonol powered beetle crawling and a non flying prototype of a bee drone with nitinol wing flappers. Rather cool but he said they are incredibly inefficient compared to traditional electric motors.
Re: Nitinol Engines (1992)
#9Nitinol is also used in the smallest & lightest servos you can buy: https://www.micronwings.com/Products/Servo%20Biometal/BioMet...
Re: Nitinol Engines (1992)
#10Application of the subject aside, Nitinol is fun to play arround with. If you want to tinker, this book comes with a coil of Nitnol wire to use in the demos contained in the book:
https://www.robotshop.com/en/muscle-wires-sample-kit.html
In my experience, challenges of Nitinol (a.k.a. 'muscle wire') for use as a electoactive linear actuator is that if you're not careful you can over heat (or apply too much tensile load to) the wire and it will permanently deform (lose it's memory). Still, and interesting material to toy around with.