Building an Iron Man Suit

By Paul Gibert '17

Ever since Iron Man premiered in 2008, it has been my dream to build my own suit of high-tech armor. I sketched designs of rocket-powered boots and repulsors as seen in the movie, but otherwise never developed my ideas beyond the sketchbook until my junior year at Episcopal. I stumbled across a design by my friend Robert Clark, of a bionic arm that operated via metal muscles that contracted and expanded similar to those of humans.

While this metal was a figment of Robert’s imagination, I raced to my laptop to research the existence of metallic muscles for use in my iron man suit. This was when I first stumbled across flexinol. Flexinol is a nickel-titanium alloy that rearranges it molecular structure when heated. When flexinol is manufactured into the shape of a thin wire it contracts when exposed to heat, similarly to a human muscle cell. I raced to show Robert my findings and we immediately began designing and modeling ideas for a flexinol muscle.

Our goal was to build one of Iron Man’s arms, and use flexinol to enable the user to lift an additional 100LBs. The first few weeks were spent learning more about flexinol, and calculating its lifting potential via heating curves. As the project continued to evolve, I contacted military companies such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, to learn about the capabilities of their robotic exoskeleton designs and Iron Man-like technologies. While many companies have developed exosuits, exoskeletons, and other robotic human strength enhancers, no design has successfully integrated into the military. The two main reasons were high power consumption and poor mobility, both of which would be important factors for us to consider in our own bionic arm.

Now, after recently finishing the theoretical calculations for flexinol heating and lifting capabilities, our goal is to conduct a lab that puts some of our theories to the test. The hope is to confirm that flexinol is capable of lifting a 100 LB load when strung over a pulley system and heated via electrical current. According to the information provided to me by Lockheed Martin and data published by Berkeley Robotics & Human Engineering Laboratory, our flexinol test has the potential to out-score current exoskeleton technologies in both power efficiency and mass to lifting power ratio.