New Material With Magnetic Shape Memory

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

"With our new composite material, we have taken another important step towards simplifying components in a wide range of applications such as medicine and robotics", says ETH Zurich and PSI materials scientist Paolo Testa, first author of the study. "Our work therefore serves as the starting point for a new class of mechanically active materials."

Numerous applications in medicine, space flight, electronics, and robotics are conceivable for shape-memory materials. For example, catheters that are pushed through blood vessels to the surgical site in the body during minimally invasive operations could change their stiffness. This has the advantage that they only have to solidify when needed and therefore produce fewer side effects such as thromboses – for example when sliding through a blood vessel. In space exploration, shape-memory materials are in demand as a kind of tyres for rover vehicles that inflate or fold up again on their own. In electronics, soft functional materials can be found as flexible power or data cables, for example in so-called wearables, i.e., devices worn in clothing or directly on the body. Shape memory also opens up new possibilities in robotics; for example, shape-memory materials can perform mechanical movements without a motor.

The video shows how the new material is forced into a loop shape with tweezers. Then a ring-shaped magnet is raised. Even if the tweezers are removed, the material retains its shape in the magnetic field. When the magnet is lowered again and the magnetic field is removed, the material returns to its original shape.

(Video: Paul Scherrer Institute - ETH Zurich/Paolo Testa)

About PSI

The Paul Scherrer Institute PSI develops, builds and operates large, complex research facilities and makes them available to the national and international research community. The institute's own key research priorities are in the fields of matter and materials, energy and environment and human health. PSI is committed to the training of future generations. Therefore about one quarter of our staff are post-docs, post-graduates or apprentices. Altogether PSI employs 2100 people, thus being the largest research institute in Switzerland. The annual budget amounts to approximately CHF 407 million. PSI is part of the ETH Domain, with the other members being the two Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology, ETH Zurich and EPFL Lausanne, as well as Eawag (Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology), Empa (Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology) and WSL (Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research).

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