Introduction

Although the space community was the original major beneficiary, a number of potential cold hibernated elastic memory (CHEM) applications are also anticipated for the “earth environment” commercial applications [1]. The unique intrinsic properties of CHEM materials make them a potential technology for numerous self-deployable and self-reconfiguring commercial products. The CHEM materials have unique characteristics that enable the manufacture of some applications not possible currently. Some of these interesting applications and products have been investigated with encouraging results and are revealed here. The potential and already-investigated CHEM commercial applications, processing stages, and heat sources for deployment are described in the following chapters. The next chapter provides a long list of interesting potential commercial CHEM applications. However, this list is by no means meant to be exhaustive and technologists anticipate other attractive CHEM commercial applications to be developed in the future. The other chapters describe the investigation and preliminary development of some CHEM commercial applications with promising results. One of these CHEM commercial products, a self-reconfiguring armchair, is already set up for mass production.