Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You can make very tiny motors with nitinol, but it is a real waste of the capability of the material. Those work by using electrical resistance to heat a sample, which moves, and then cools off and can be moved back again, such as by a spring. Turning high-grade electrical energy to low-grade heat, thence to motion, wastes most of it (probably ~70%) vs. a magnetic motor that wastes normally less than 10%. But nitinol…
Re: Nitinol Engines (1992)
#31Yea thats how it tied in with the over all microcombusters talk, they were using tiny swiss roll burners to power the nitinol motors. Due to liquid fuels having higher energy densities than batteries apparently they could go for much longer than their electrical counterparts even though they weren't as efficient.