The idea for this project is to use the memory of nitinol to create automatically folded clothes when it is heated in the dryer. The prototype began with wrapping the wire around a metal tube, and heating it to 300 celsius. The instructions were to heat it up to 500 Celsius, until the wire glows red, but the oven was all I had at the moment.
The wire was dunked in water after it came outside the oven, and it stretched itself back out when it was unraveled, so I thought that the shape was not formed didn’t work because it didn’t reach 500 degrees. But it ended up working, the wire curls instead of stretches out when heated with a heat gun.
All the sewing machines were taken in the shop, so I had to resort to taping the wire to a piece of foam. Halfway through taping, I tested to see if the foam would melt to the heat gun, and it did. So I had to find a different piece of fabric to attach the wire to.
The only other piece of fabric was this silky green cloth. It was very unstructured which made it extremely difficult to get the tape on the fabric in a straight line since the wire itself was not straight either. I did the best I could and it came out ok.
