But he's done it, in a sense, for wheelchairs. Nasser, a NASA engineer, inventor and quadriplegic, has created a wheel that could dramatically reduce how much energy a wheelchair user expends moving his or her chair forward.
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Now Rowheels, the company he cofounded in , hopes to bring the wheel to market later this year. If successful, it should mean more efficient mobility and healthier bodies for users, Nasser says. Standard manual wheelchairs require users to grasp and push a rim that extends from the chair's back wheels. It's a decent enough method for self-propulsion, but it taxes small, weak muscles in the shoulders and arms and can lead to repetitive stress injuries.
Nasser's wheel helps target bigger muscles. Using a mechanical device called a planetary gear, Nasser redesigned the wheel hub so that users pull it backwards in a rowing motion to go forward. Planetary gears are used in automatic transmissions and power tools to reverse and reduce motion, but no wheelchair wheels on the market currently use this design, Nasser says.
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Jackie Justus, a spinal cord nursing educator at Zablocki Veterans Administration Medical Center in Milwaukee, says a rowing motion for wheelchair users would be a "big step forward and save them a lot of wear and tear. Pulling, she says, uses larger stronger muscle groups, while pushing a wheelchair uses little muscles in the front of the body and also hunches over the upper body.
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The rowing motion makes wheelchair users sit up straight, she says, allowing the diaphragm to function properly and significantly improve breathing. His day job is designing and analyzing equipment for mobile launchers used to assist space shuttles.
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He led a relatively normal life until age 20 when a drunk ran a stop sign and smashed into Nasser's car. After the accident, he moved to Miami to recover. Four years later, he'd gained enough confidence to apply at Florida International University in Miami. He was accepted and excelled, earning his undergraduate and master's degrees in mechanical engineering over the next 5. During several summers, he was an intern at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. An inventor at heart, Nasser began working on a new kind of wheelchair wheel in college.
Thin tread strips were attached to the carcass to enhance flotation in soft lunar soil. While NASA was developing rovers to send to Mars, there was also interest in taking a new look at returning to the Moon. NASA Glenn engineers rebuilt Apollo era tires and developed new designs using newer materials and technology to better function on a lunar surface.
During the mids, NASA Glenn engineer Vivake Asnani worked with industry partner Goodyear to develop the Spring Tire , an airless compliant tire that consists of several hundred coiled steel wires woven into a flexible mesh, giving the tires the ability to support high loads while also conforming to the terrain.
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The Spring Tire has been proven to generate very good traction and durability in soft sand and on rocks. A little over a year after the Mars Curiosity Rover landed on Mars, engineers began to notice significant wheel damage in due to the unexpectedly harsh terrain, causing concern about the ability of the rover to drive far enough to complete its intended mission. So, they set about developing several Spring Tire prototypes to improve: In one particular moment of serendipity, Engineer Colin Creager and Materials Scientist Santo Padula had a conversation that completely changed the path forward.
The game changing material that dramatically advanced the development of spring tires was nickel titanium , a shape memory alloy with amazing capabilities as explained by Santo Padula.
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It performed impressively on the punishing track. So, why are shape memory alloys the key to success for this new generation of spring tires? It has to do with the atomic structure. Take a look to find out. There are three major benefits to developing high performing compliant tires that are capable of performing in a Martian or Lunar environment. First, they would allow rovers to explore greater regions of the surface than currently possible.
Secondly, because they conform to the terrain and do not sink as much as rigid wheels, they can carry heavier payloads for the same given mass and volume. Lastly, because the compliant tires can absorb energy from impacts at moderate to high speeds, they can be used on crewed exploration vehicles which are expected to move at speeds significantly higher than the current Mars rovers.