Surprisingly STEM: Memory Metal Engineer

An elephant supposedly never forgets, but apparently some metals can have a pretty good memory too! Shape memory metal engineer Othmane Benafan “trains” metal to take specific shapes when prompted. In this episode, Benafan irons out the details of how he creates alloys that can bend, stretch, and twist when heat is applied, and how this technology is turning up the heat on what’s possible for NASA missions.

What is said in the film

NASA's missions are one of a kind. It's exploration. Three, two, one... and liftoff of Artemis 1! It's discovery.

It's the unknown out there in the planets. So it does require very specific materials. We create materials that will enable things to work in Mars, things to work in the moon or Venus, when conventional materials cannot work. The materials that I work with are known as shape-memory alloys. My name is Othmane Benafan.

My job is Materials Research Engineer at NASA Glenn Research Center. And I create metals with a memory. It's natural for someone to think about rockets, about airplanes, about astronauts, when we associate the word "NASA". But not many people think about what material is used in that rocket. What material is used in that spacesuit or that aircraft.

You have to develop a material that is gonna withstand very high temperatures of space. You have to develop a material that is flexible, yet perhaps durable for an astronaut to go do actions and things in space. So materials really is at the heart of all these missions that NASA does, from rockets to material. My favorite part of the job is not knowing the answer. We have to go play in a sandbox and figure it out.

It gives us an opportunity to create something that doesn't exist. To make a shape-memory alloy, you have to pick the right elements, and you have to pick the right quantity of that element. So, shape-memory alloy requires the chemistry, the actual formulation, but then you have to tell it what to do. You have to put that memory into it. You have to tell the metal to bend, to stretch, or you have to tell it to twist.

The metal itself senses a signal, like heat, and it reacts to it. And then by reacting to it, it goes to a predetermined form. So if you want it to bend, or open a valve, or open up door, as you heat it and cool it, it can do that function by applying heat, removing heat, applying heat, removing heat. It's like training your dog to do a flip. We have to train the metal to do a twist or to do a bend.

Testing shape-memory alloys does require some special equipment and special skills, too. So in our labs here, we have specialized equipment to be able to expose the material of these shape-memory alloys on the microstructure level that you see the atoms moving from one point to the other. And if they don't, you have to understand why they don't and fix it. Fix it either by more testing, or going back to the drawing board and adding more elements here and there from a recipe that allows you to do it. As a kid, I wasn't exposed to space.

I wasn't exposed to NASA. I was born in Tangier, Morocco. I lived in a coastal city, so that influence was there all the time. I always imagined myself working on building ships or submarines. And here we are today.

I'm not too far from that dream. I used to dream of working on sea ships, etcetera. And today, I'm NASA and I'm working on spaceships. When I was 19 years old, I moved 4,000 miles to Orlando, Florida. Moving from Morocco to Florida with one goal, which is to go to school.

Continue education. But one little fact that I missed was that going to university costs a fortune. I had to work all day to pay the bills. So many places, they don't allow you to take night classes. At this community college, they worked around people's lives.

Someone like me that has to work the entire day and then go to school at night. So I was lucky to find a community college in the area, at that time was in Orlando, where I attended my classes. I would say about sophomore year, I was in a class and my professor showed a metal that he heated and it went back to shape. First of all, metal changing shape when you heat it, that was like, what's going on here? I have to know more.

From that time on, I learned more about shape-memory alloys. I asked that professor more questions than he could ever answer about shape-memory alloys. And, eventually, he invited me to join his research group, and I stayed with him for six years after that, until I graduated. I am at NASA today, not because I'm a genius or I'm special. I really think about myself as a dedicated learner.

When I need to learn something, I turn every rock until I find a solution, and I go for it. And that will be my number one advice is, if you wanna learn something, no one will hand it to you. You have to go grab it. Someone like me. Thousands of miles from Morocco.

English as a third language. Broke immigrant. None of it stopped me from pursuing my dream. So if you have a dream, no matter how wrinkled that path is, no matter what obstacle's in front of you, find a new path. Change the way you look at it.

But don't change your dream. The sky is not the limit. Just go for it.

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