#shape memory

Shape memory

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Marcus Fischer & Simon Scott ~ Shape Memory

Shape Memory is an album of beauty and friendship, recorded when two like-minded artists were able to find time to share a musical vision.  The title implies both the shaping of memory and the memories of shapes, and the elliptical music follows suit.  Field recordings and tape loops interact with live instrumentation to create a tone of mingled time.  The studio date was fall, the release date…

STRETCHABLE POLYMER REVERTS BACK TO ORIGINAL SHAPE WHEN TRIGGERED BY BODY HEAT

Shape memory materials that can revert back into a desired form after being bent, twisted and stretched are finding their way into a number of applications, ranging from sports bras to more efficient refrigerators. One team of scientists is now examining potential biomedical applications, with a polymer that can revert to its original form when it comes into contact with heat from the human body.

Call it one small step for material science, one giant leap for origami. Researchers have created the first heat-reactive polymer material that can not only remember its current shape but also memorize new ones. The material—which currently requires high temperatures to change shape and reset its memory—could lead to a new generation of reusable self-folding materials that could be useful for everything from medical implants to shape-shifting electronics.

Self-folding materials aren’t new. The first generation of shape memory polymers folded into a single predetermined shape whenever they were heated. Later generations could be triggered by other stimuli, such as light, electrical charges, or a magnetic field. But they all relied on a property known as elasticity. When cool, their stringy polymers coil up. They straighten out into a new shape when heated, and then they bend right back to the default shape once they cool off again. In this way, they keep a “memory” of their original shape.

But elastic shape memory materials can only memorize two or three shapes. A 2005 Science paper offered a possible route to hundreds or even thousands: Rather than elasticity—the tendency for a material to come back to the same shape—the paper demonstrated a way to trigger a change in a material's plasticity, that is its ability to be reshaped.