SoylentNews

freesword writes:

According to this Engineering.com story, researchers at MIT are working to develop a skin tight spacesuit by utilizing shape-memory alloy (SMA). While a conventional spacesuit is a balloon of gas providing the necessary one-third atomosphere of pressure to survive in the vaccuum of space, SMAs might provide pressure directly to the skin through mechanical counter-pressure, resulting in a form-fitting yet flexible spacesuit.

The team is working with a coil design conceived by postdoc Bradley Holschuh.

To train the material, Holschuh first wound raw SMA fiber into extremely tight, millimeter-diameter coils then heated the coils to 450 degrees Celsius to set them into an original, or “trained” shape. At room temperature, the coils may be stretched or bent, much like a paper clip. However, at a certain “trigger” temperature (in this case, as low as 60 C), the fiber will begin to spring back to its trained, tightly coiled state.

The researchers rigged an array of coils to an elastic cuff, attaching each coil to a small thread linked to the cuff. They then attached leads to the coils’ opposite ends and applied a voltage, generating heat. Between 60 and 160 C, the coils contracted, pulling the attached threads, and tightening the cuff.

“These are basically self-closing buckles,” Holschuh says. “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 team still need to overcome the challenge of keeping the suit in it's trained state which would require either maintaining the "trigger" temperature or a locking mechanism to keep the coils from loosening and are looking into several designs for the placement of the coils.