Oricalco

The 'Thermal Shape Memory Alloy' is characterized by its extraordinary ability to recover any shape, pre-programmed, upon heating. Until today this light weight alloy with about 50% Titanium inside has been used in advanced sectors like space and recently in medical applications.

Moreover this fabric is the first for which the shape memory alloy, named Nitinol, was weaved orthogonally that is to say that Oricalco is the first fabric with shape memory capacities created industrally.In this framework, Grado Zero Espace has used Thermal Shape Memory metals as a fabric for the manufacturing of a shirt with long sleeves which was made in this fabric.

The sleeves fabric could be programmed to shorten immediately as the room temperature became a few degree hotter. The fabric can be screwed up into a hard ball, pleated and creased then just by a flux of hot air (even a hairdyer) pop back automatically to its former shape.

Source: gzespace.comAdded: 10 April 2007