This week has been a tremendous success for the SCP Actuator team. We were finally able to successfully coil and anneal our actuators. Initially after completing the setup thoroughly and applying all of the conditions of the papers to the experimental setup, the 117/17 thread was still not coiling. It was snapping despite our attempts at trying low RPM, low weight, high RPM, and high weight. In order to determine whether this was an issue with our setup we decided to go back and use the original material used to create SCP actuators—fishing line. The coils were successfully inserted at 200 RPM and 100 grams as the dead weight. Therefore, we were able to determine that the experimental setup was indeed correct and there was a problem in the type of string used. Next, we used the 235/34 thread, which was also reported being used in some papers. From this thread we were able to successfully form coils in fibers of 30 cm precursor lengths. We used the same conditions (200 RPM, 100 grams) to insert the coils. The final length of the coiled actuator was 8 cm. We then attempted to anneal the actuators. Here are the pictures of the finalized actuators with the annealing conditions specified. This week will focus on creating a better algorithm for the annealing process, including a method to determine the temperature of the actuator.

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