Virginia Tech advances additive friction stir deposition - creating a strong, defect-free material that can be 3D printed in bulk.

Since his postdoctoral days at MIT, Hang Yu, associate professor of materials science and engineering, has been wrestling with the challenge of creating a shape-memory ceramic that can be manufactured ...

A German research team has prototyped an extraordinary heating/cooling system that stresses and unloads nickel-titanium "muscle wires" to create heated and cooled air at twice the efficiency of a heat ...

Shape-memory metals, which can revert from one shape to a different one simply by being warmed or otherwise triggered, have been useful in a variety of applications, as actuators that can control the ...

Engineers at Saarland University have taken a leaf out of nature's book by equipping an artificial hand with muscles made from shape-memory wire. The new technology enables the fabrication of flexible ...

Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. A metal that can move on its own will play a key role in NASA’s next voyage to Mars A metal that can move on its ...

In the world of commercial materials, lighter and cheaper is usually better, especially when those attributes are coupled with superior strength and special properties, such as a material's ability to ...

Scientists captured live action details of the phase transitions of shape memory alloys, giving them a better idea how to improve their properties for applications. Known to many as muscle wire or ...

A good tire means a lot when the nearest roadside assistance is 34 million miles (55 million kilometers) away. For future rovers that will explore the surface of Mars, NASA scientists have created a ...