Di Mainstone

Sometime last year we spoke to Di Mainstone after her inspirational lecture at the university Newport about Nitinol. She gave us a brief overview of the material, and we have been using her work as a sort of nitinol how-to handbook. In the above video you can see her insulating the nitinol with glass beads. We have recently got our hands on some thicker nitinol that gets rather hot and so insulation may be a necessity, either using glass beads on points of articulation or coating the entire length of nitinol in silicon.

Although Di Mainstones work is very relevant to ours, her use of nitinol as an actuator is 

nowhere near as realised as we hope Rhosynn to be. The movement induced via the nitinol 

is small and subtle while we aim ours to be grand and total.

We can see here that Mainstone largely uses the spring formation of nitinol externally to achieve movement, we plan on using it internally. We have planned to interview Di Mainstone over skype with claire to ask a few logistical questions, like how she made connections with the nitinol to conductive thread.