Space
MIT Researchers Design Skin-Tight Spacesuit with Tiny, Muscle-like Coils
Catherine Griffin
First Posted: Sep 20, 2014 07:06 AM EDT
Imagine being in space. Now, imagine that instead of a bulky spacesuit, you can put on a skintight, stretchy garment lined with tiny, musclelike coils. Sounds a bit like science fiction, right? But that's exactly what MIT researchers are intent on creating, and they've taken a step closer to accomplishing their goals.
Currently, the researchers are focused on creating an active, "second-skin" spacesuit. So far, they've managed to create small, springlike coils that contract in response to heat. The coils themselves are made from a shape-memory alloy (SMA), which is a type of material that "remembers" an engineered shape and when bent or deformed can spring back to this shape.
"With conventional spacesuits, you're essentially in a balloon of gas that's providing you with the necessary one-third of an atmosphere [of pressure' to keep you alive in the vacuum of space," said Dava Newman, one of the researchers who helped engineer the coils, in a news release. "We want to achieve that same pressurization, but through mechanical counterpressure-applying the pressure directly to the skin, thus avoiding the gas pressure altogether. We combine passive elastics with active materials...Ultimately, the big advantage is mobility, and a very lightweight suit for planetary exploration."
More specifically, the coils are made from nickel-titanium shape-memory alloys. These allows can be "trained" to return to an original shape in response to a certain temperature. In order to train the material, the researchers first wound raw SMA fiber into extremely tight coils and then heated them before setting them into an original, "trained" shape. At room temperature, the coils can be stretched or bent; but when a certain trigger temperature is reached, the fiber springs back to its original shape.
"These are basically self-closing buckles," said Bradley Holschuh, one of the researchers. "Once you put the suit on, you can run a current through all these little features, and the suit will shrink-wrap you and pull closed."
The findings bring researchers another step closer to designing a spacesuit that can be easily put on and allow for more mobility. Currently, they're contemplating several designs as for where the coils may be threaded within a spacesuit. That said, more research will need to be conducted before they create a spacesuit that will keep astronauts protected within the harsh environment of space. Yet this does represent a huge step forward toward success.
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First Posted: Sep 20, 2014 07:06 AM EDT
Imagine being in space. Now, imagine that instead of a bulky spacesuit, you can put on a skintight, stretchy garment lined with tiny, musclelike coils. Sounds a bit like science fiction, right? But that's exactly what MIT researchers are intent on creating, and they've taken a step closer to accomplishing their goals.
Currently, the researchers are focused on creating an active, "second-skin" spacesuit. So far, they've managed to create small, springlike coils that contract in response to heat. The coils themselves are made from a shape-memory alloy (SMA), which is a type of material that "remembers" an engineered shape and when bent or deformed can spring back to this shape.
"With conventional spacesuits, you're essentially in a balloon of gas that's providing you with the necessary one-third of an atmosphere [of pressure' to keep you alive in the vacuum of space," said Dava Newman, one of the researchers who helped engineer the coils, in a news release. "We want to achieve that same pressurization, but through mechanical counterpressure-applying the pressure directly to the skin, thus avoiding the gas pressure altogether. We combine passive elastics with active materials...Ultimately, the big advantage is mobility, and a very lightweight suit for planetary exploration."
More specifically, the coils are made from nickel-titanium shape-memory alloys. These allows can be "trained" to return to an original shape in response to a certain temperature. In order to train the material, the researchers first wound raw SMA fiber into extremely tight coils and then heated them before setting them into an original, "trained" shape. At room temperature, the coils can be stretched or bent; but when a certain trigger temperature is reached, the fiber springs back to its original shape.
"These are basically self-closing buckles," said Bradley Holschuh, one of the researchers. "Once you put the suit on, you can run a current through all these little features, and the suit will shrink-wrap you and pull closed."
The findings bring researchers another step closer to designing a spacesuit that can be easily put on and allow for more mobility. Currently, they're contemplating several designs as for where the coils may be threaded within a spacesuit. That said, more research will need to be conducted before they create a spacesuit that will keep astronauts protected within the harsh environment of space. Yet this does represent a huge step forward toward success.
See Now: NASA's Juno Spacecraft's Rendezvous With Jupiter's Mammoth Cyclone