For the past few days the temperature outside has been hovering around 0 C, and while going between buildings with one of our stents, the Materials Science major on the team noticed that the stent started acting abnormally.
See, this stent is made of nitinol, which is a shape memory alloy. When you deform it, it returns to its original shape, usually pretty quickly. So we bend the stent, and it bounces back. We compress it, and it elongates again, not deforming at all. But when my teammate took the stent outside, the outside temperature was below one of the transition temperatures for nitinol. She bent the stent, and it was cold enough that the stent stayed bent.
Of course, once we figured this out, we all had to go outside for ten minutes with a bunch of different nitinol stents and try this. It's fantastic. And then as we went back inside, the stents slowly warmed up and returned to their original shape.
Conclusions: nitinol is cool, temperature matters, and we're easily entertained by basic materials science.
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