The muscle wire moving hand kit is widely sold via internet markets to familiarize ordinary people with the technology of muscle wires. This technology represents the unique formula of the nickel-titanium alloy – the material for the creation of a number of useful and widely used for the domestic purposes things. The nickel-titanium alloy is used in various branches of science and medicine – hence, for completely different purposes. However, the mechanism of usage remains the same. And here’s how it works. Under the specific conditions, the alloy presents the reaction opposite to the most of others metal alloys. When this alloy is heated it contracts and, on contrary, when frozen – it stretches.
Among the most widely recognized cases of the above-mentioned alloy usage is the use of the arterial or coronary stents – the modern-medicine device created to be placed in the human body’s arteries to maintain better bloodstream and blood supply to the heart. This procedure is called the percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). The stents made of the nickel-titanium alloy are used in 90 percent of all the PCI procedures. It is also used for the creation of the orthodontic braces – a device that aligns and straighten teeth. The device helps to position teeth with regard to a person’s bite. Surprised? Here are more. This miraculous alloy was also used for the Nasa’s space missions – Clementine (1994), Pathfinder ( 1997) and others.
The variety of implementation of the nickel-titanium alloy makes it one of the most advanced developments in the field of metal-combining. This alloy known also as a Nitinol is used in muscle wire robot construction exactly thanks to its unique properties – shape memory effect and extremely high elasticity. This elasticity is some 10-30 times better than of the ordinary metals.
With the creation of a Flexy hand technology, hundreds of thousands of people have got a chance to receive the arm prosthetics instead of the limbs lost due to accidents. Nowadays the idea of the movie “I,Robot” (2004), to replace damaged parts of the body with artificial ones is no longer science fiction. Now people with disabilities can wear prosthetics and feel equal to other people and perform actions they would be unable without prosthetics. Muscle wire hand kit uses Muscle Wire technology to imitate the realistic moving of a human hand. These imitation moves made a significant change to the world of robotics. Each finger of the artificial hand has its own muscle wires connected to the apparatus capable of heating wires, which makes them contracting just like a real human hand. When the wires heated fingers connected to them bend and vice versa.
The development of the muscle wire hand inspired the developers of robotics to implement this technology for creating the educational robotic kits for youngsters who are striving to learn the fundamental basis of robotics.
The Shape Memory Alloy (SMA) wires technology still has an unidentified potential in different fields, from the industrial assembly processes to biomedical equipment. Because of the great power embodied in lightweight scales, the SMA systems perform a high amount of work as the precise linear actuators. The technology is already implemented and praised in the field of the prostheses construction and the human-machine robotics. SMA systems as the antagonistic muscles already found its implementation in the machine-building industry like the car factories, where most of the working processes are now automated. Such an automation technology eases the process of machine-building and lifts the technological progress of the actuators construction to a new level where the precise and correct moves no longer require the immediate human participation in all aspects of the process.
