Nitinol

Sometimes the title of an article might sound pretty boring and the title of this article is no exception. I suppose you are all wondering what the heck Nitinol is, so I will tell you. It is an alloy of Nichol and titanium. Still doesn’t sound exciting right? Who would write an article about an alloy, I know I wouldn’t unless there was something so spectacular about it that I knew everyone would be interested, so let me tell you what is going on here. Nitinol is one of the new memory metals. This means under the right circumstances it will always go back into its original shape, the shape of when it was created. It is not one of those memory metals you can crush up and it springs back, it depends on a little amount of heat to spring back and a little amount of cold to become a wet noodle again. When it was discovered engineers began to look at it through the eyes of conservationists. It had special properties which they thought we could utilize.

One of the things we have the most of on this planet is excess heat, or waste heat. Almost everything we use generates this waste heat, even our bodies give it off. If we look at the problems of our planet we can’t help but notice our dependence on oil is contributing to global warming and even dumping carbon into some places on our planet. This gave a scientist an idea. The Lawrence Laboratory at Berkley has been giving these problems some thought as it experiments with Nitinol. Nitinol is not an energy source, but it is an excess heat user. It is said once bent Nitinol can spring back with the force of 55 tons per square inch. This is an incredible amount of power, but we have to add to this fact it is now being said a new type of Nitinol has been developed called super Nitinol which is much stronger. Professor Edwin McMillan began to experiment with the alloy. An engineer at the lab Ridgeway Banks also became interested in the alloy and decided he would try and build an engine out of it using its strange properties as the powering force.

The first engine he built was nothing more than a wheel with loops of Nitinol hanging from each spoke. Two tanks of water were at the bottom and the wheel would pass first through one then the other. One tank had warm water the other cold water. As the wheel passed through the hot water the wheel would be propelled around, because of the expansion of the Nitinol and when the Nitinol reached the tank of cold water it would become limp again. The wheel began to spin in 1973 and was allowed to turn this way for 23,000,000 revolutions and was checked. It was found that incredibly the metal got stronger, but the scientists and engineers had no explanation for this. This was the first time heat was converted directly into mechanical energy. It does make one wonder why all these years later we have not seen a Nitinol engine doesn’t it?

A meeting of Nobel Prize winning scientists was held the next year and Professor McMillan told them about what he had discovered. The Nitinol powered wheel was said to be close to perpetual motion. It did have power of course which came from heat, but not a lot of heat was needed. One of the perfect areas for Nitinol engines to take advantage of is the waste heat produced in industrial plants. The heat could be used to power Nitinol engines which could then produce things like electricity or even power other machines. It was estimated the cost of a Nitinol engine could be recovered in about 1.5 to 2 years and after that the power from it would be free. Another use was said to be generating engines which used the currents in the ocean, because there is a temperature difference between them which may be high enough to power a Nitinol engine. A solar heated Nitinol irrigation pump would be the answer to many of the problems in the third world and would also be handy and cheap for the farmers here. Where are these pumps?

The idea of Nitinol engines was said to have been killed by the energy industry decades ago, because they obviously didn’t want us to get free energy. Remember profit is king and it wasn’t only the Nitinol engine which was killed but many other power saving inventions. Was it completely killed or were there exceptions? There have been rumors of the Defense Department having some secret Nitinol projects. There is no way to know if this is true or not, but it does seem they would have been crazy to ignore the usefulness of this alloy.

I don’t know how others feel, but I am tired of useful inventions being killed just because it hurts big business. Imagine if horses were controlled by huge conglomerates a couple of hundred years ago and the steam engine came along. They would have bought the rights to it and shelved it. The same with the internal combustion engine. We would still be riding on horses. We are still riding on oil, so to speak and all the ingenious energy saving inventions which have been destroyed have set us back tremendously. There should be some way to safeguard new discoveries. Patents are not the answer, many of the technologies which have disappeared were patented. It is easy to just buy a company and destroy it if your company is rolling in dough.

Nitinol had such promise and yet most of us have never heard about it. It was something developed by world renowned scientists and engineers, not something someone created in a garage and made claims about, so we know it worked. There are even videos of it working in the lab and comments from the scientists and engineers of the time. You have to wonder how something with so much going for it could be prevented from coming to market. It just proves how powerful corporations and ultra-rich individuals can be. We still see things being constructed from it here and there, but the industrial manufacturing of engines was never started. There are some references to brittleness at times, but this was not noticed in the Livermore wheel which just got stronger with use so I have to wonder about the truthfulness of these statements. If some problems were found with Nitinol in the 1970s they probably could have been solved by now.