Like a great many things in comic books, theoretically, it is very much possible. As it stands, our current understanding of the natural world places no implicit limitations on any of the attributes of the Iron Man armor. The Physics of every aspect of that suit is in fact very plausible, and downright realistic.HOWEVER, the Engineering of an exosuit like that, is a whole other matter! Each feature of the suit, however benign they may seem, is a MARVELous feat of engineering purely in its own rite. To design a weapon that powerful, yet managing to keep it so nimble, lightweight, hollow, not to mention safe for humans that happen to be inside it, will require ungodly quantities of raw ingenuity.

But it is also a famous saying that "necessity is the mother of invention". So let's see technology we need to become Iron Man. 

8 Inventions To Be Made To Become IRON MAN

1. ARC REACTOR

First, foremost, and most obviously, consider the insanely glorified light bulb he wears on his chest: the infamous arc reactor. From this singular device emanates all the energy that powers the suit, a nontrivial amount that deserves its own post. Everything from the powerful lasers that effortlessly slice through Hammer-oids and debris stuck in helicarriers, to the insanely deadly pulses of ionized matter that he projects from the repulsors on his palms, presumably his heels, and every other thruster, in order to achieve continuous, rangeless, hypersonic flight, or blow a cyborg’s robotic arm clean off with a single pulse. The amount of energy required to actually pull feats like these would at least be on the order of gigajoules. In fact, in the first movie, Tony specifically divulged a number describing the power output of his first prototype of the miniaturized arc reactor: 3 Gigajoules per second. No, seriously, three billion watts. That’s big enough to be just shy of the total power output of the largest nuclear power plant in the United States, the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, a power station with an output of 3.3 Gigajoules per second.Add to this thermodynamic nightmare the extra detail of the operating principle behind the arc reactor: it runs on nuclear fusion! While nuclear fusion is demonstrably achievable in laboratory settings, a fusion reaction has not been successfully mined for its energy; basically, present methods of fusion require more energy to kickstart than the amount of energy that is released from it. So, that (rather massive) wrinkle, though only an engineering problem, must first be solved. Then, we must miniaturize a Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR), the design that the arc reactor is based upon. Just for clarity, a TFTR is essentially a doughnut shaped hollow magnetic tube that rapidly accelerates and contains high energy plasma. Plasma is the hottest state of matter that we know of, and it would easily burn through anything. Now, to contain enough plasma that can generate 3.3 Gigajoules of energy every second within a device the size of your hand, without it getting hot, is thermodynamically herculean to say the least. To do that, you’d need some downright magic material that can somehow conduct electricity, does not conduct heat, is light enough to hold in one hand, and does not deform under enormous pressure. With the arc reactor, there are a slew of engineering challenges to solve, from the material science that will make it possible in the first place, to the development of fusion technology, and would probably take multiple lifetimes to solve.And that’s just the arc reactor.

2. INERTIAL DAMPENERS

You might be wondering why this would be necessary, that is until you consider the epic aerial maneuvers that Tony stark routinely pulls while in flight. Every roll, every twist, every abrupt stop, has to involve dangerously rapid acceleration and deceleration. Remember when he was taking the MK-02 for a test flight halfway through the first movie, and upon asking JARVIS about the altitude record of the SR-71, he suddenly aims his flight path skyward in an attempt to break said record? Or when he was in that dogfight with the F-22’s on the way back home from his revenge vendetta in Gulmira, and he was being shot, then he suddenly decelerates so fast that the fighter jets barely get out of the way? G-forces (a measure of acceleration where one unit is the acceleration due to gravity on the earth) of this magnitude really should kill him instantly, or break his bones and knock him unconscious at the very least. You might be thinking of a G-suit right about now, but if you do the math, you find that a G-suit simply won’t cut it. In the dogfight scene, he decelerates so much he presumably attains infrasonic velocity almost instantly. That’s G’s in the thousands. Forces like that should cause his brain to rattle violently in his skull, hemorrhaging his brain immediately. To fix this, he’d have to have intricate systems to dissipate the forces incurred by his inertia, probably with some sort of magnetic dampening system that converts all that kinetic energy into something easily discardable, say, heat energy, so that he doesn’t die when he’s suddenly smacked in the face by a tank shell. Oh, and speaking of…

3. TANK MISSILES

Plummeting out of the sky, and falling so fast and hard he craters his crash site, he immediately gets up, WITHOUT BROKEN BONES (refer to inertial dampener problem), fires a tiny rocket at a tank, and after about a second of delay, the tank violently explodes! If I had to guess, the tank missile contains an RDX payload, and does not explode on impact. Instead, it’s possible that there’s some mechanism used by the rocket to drill through the tank’s hull, then deploy the RDX payload. Could such a tank missile be built? In theory, yes. In fact, it might be the simplest component of the battle suit that is the Iron Man armor.

4. SPECIALIZED MATERIALS

Further on the subject of tanks and missiles, among other more truly wonderful things like the arc reactor, the materials that are used to build these specialized components that do a wide variety of things, must be meticulously engineered, as no ordinary materials can even begin to perform well under these circumstances. For example, consider the material that makes up the bulk of the suit’s exterior: it can absorb a punch from a tank shell without deforming or breaking, yet dissipating all that energy so as to not kill the Tony inside it.Steel can’t do it, because it’s much too heavy. However, one might be thinking: what of a Gold-Titanium (AuTi) alloy? Like with many superhero related things, one would think this would be an easy “no”, but as it turns out, the material is surprisingly strong, having improved yield strength, tensile strength, and hardness, of up to 50%, compared to commercially pure titanium. Now, the material doesn’t quite hold up to the stress that the movies would have you believe, but perhaps coated with other more powerful materials that might, such as Titanium Nitride (TiN) or Titanium Aluminum Nitride (TiAlN), although these materials are typically used to coat Tungsten Carbide (WC) which is about twice the density of steel, which is undesirable if flight is desired.Then there’s the matter of the arc reactor, by far the most fantastic piece of technology on that suit. Materials that would contain the heat and ionizing radiation that emanates from high-energy plasma, while sustaining a powerful magnetic field that confines aforementioned plasma, without pulling all the iron straight out of his blood, while remaining thin and light (you know, because it fits in one hand) would have to be engineered on the atomic scale, maybe even subatomic. Maybe. That’s materials science research 100 space races ahead of its time.

5. AFTERBURNERS

On the palms of the hands, soles of the feet, and sometimes, in other nooks, crannies, and on extra backpack-like structures, there are powerful thrusters that double as weapons that eject possibly concussive bursts of high energy plasma. One could suggest building chemical rockets, but there are so many things wrong with that: the efficiency, the heat management, the power-to-weight ratio, fuel depletion rate. Of course, this isn’t to say that alternative thrust methods don’t come with their own challenges, because they most certainly do. Consider a propulsion scheme called VASIMR (VAriable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket). It works by heating a neutral gas propellant with radio waves until it becomes plasma, then accelerating it to breakneck speeds with a powerful magnetic field as it exits the nozzle, propelling its payload (a spaceship, some cargo, you get the idea) in the other direction, a la Newton’s third law.Problem with this type of propulsion though, is that they pretty much do not work in atmosphere, so flying under bridges and over mountains isn’t quite possible with that kind of thruster. Chemical rockets can do this without a hitch, but they do not last for long, given you have to lug the fuel around, while burning it. However, a possible workaround might involve ejecting small quantities of air (or plasma) at subluminal speeds, so that Newton’s third law would allow thrust to be practical, although, at that level of speed, you’d need a whole lot more than Newton’s work to save you.Perhaps what Iron Man actually uses is some kind of chemical propulsion system that is somehow able to mine its fuel straight from the air at an alarming rate, without blowing the suit up in smithereens. That paradigm of propulsion would in fact enable the aerial acrobatics he routinely executes with seemingly no hitches; after all, he DOES leave a “smoke” trail in his wake.

6. CYBERNETIC CONTROL

As far as one can tell, Tony’s control of his suit is at least partly cybernetic, more than likely through his helmet. Cybernetic control has seen some major advances over the last few years, but it’s still a far cry from being pin-point accurate, without requiring an invasive procedure. This is largely because the skull itself adds unpredictable noise to the signals that would be measured and recorded by an electroencephalograph, the input device to this cybernetic control system. As of right now, the amount of concentration required to use an EEG to say, flick a light bulb on or off, is far more than is needed to actually reach out and flick a switch. Scale up this problem, and it becomes obvious that the amount of concentration required to perform all the nuanced tasks that Tony Stark does while in the Iron Man suit is beyond herculean, further complicated by the fact that half the time, he’s in immediate danger, making focus even harder to achieve. To fix this problem, if invasive procedures were off the table, non invasive EEGs would have to get astronomically better. Perhaps skull tissue would have to be scrutinized on an atomic level, have all its properties tested from materials science and electromagnetic perspectives, so that equations can be generated to better model the sorts of interference that can be expected from the skull barrier, thus improving the sensitivity and usefulness of noninvasive electroencephalograms.

7. AUGMENTED REALITY

As of today, this one bit has actually been done more or less successfully. Tech giants in Washington and Silicon Valley have successfully pulled this off. My favorite example of this is the Microsoft HoloLens. Through lots of complicated methods, using extremely powerful (and proprietary) hardware, Microsoft released the first truly AR experience. Exactly how they did it, not a lot of people know, given it is proprietary technology. At least it’s real though, meaning that these methods can be obtained with sufficient research.

8. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Also known as JARVIS, Tony’s robo-butler accompanied him almost everywhere, most noticeably in his suit, that is until he brought the bloke to life and that duty was relinquished to Friday, which is a whole other topic! To create something as unique and as powerful as JARVIS would be monumentally difficult, far surpassing the complexity of “AI” like Cortana (the real one, not the one in the video games) or Google Now. To do that requires answering once and for all, the question “What is consciousness?”. I know it sounds like a new-agey question, but it’s actually a very profound question in the research fields related to http://cognition.To then come close to pulling off a feat of innovation such as this, one would have to innovate on so many levels, particularly in the field of computational neuroscience. This multidisciplinary field manages to require mathematics, physics, computer science, cognitive science, psychology, electrical engineering, and neuroscience. That’s seven fields. Seven. One would have to be Rain Man on NZT48 and Speed to pull something like this off, in one lifetime.In summary, the sheer amount of work that’d have to be done in order to fully realize technology like that, would take ALL of humanity several generations, and trillions of dollars to figure out. Or one unimaginably rich, young, and bored bloke, with a five digit IQ, and access to a LIMITLESS supply of NZT48.