The unique thermo-mechanical behavior of Shape Memory Alloys (SMAs), such as their ability to recover the original shape upon heating or being able to tolerate large deformations without undergoing plastic transformations, makes them a good choice for actuators.
This work studies their application in the aerospace and defense industries where SMA components can serve as release mechanisms for gates of enclosures that have to be deployed remotely. This work provides a novel approach in evaluating the stress and heat induced change of phase in a SMA, in terms of the transformation strain tensor. In particular, the FEA tool
ANSYS has been used to perform a 2-D analysis of a Cu-Al-Zn-Mn SMA specimen undergoing a nontraditional loading path in two steps with stress and heating loads. In the first load step, tensile displacement is applied, followed by the second load step in which the specimen is heated while the end displacements are held constant.
A number of geometric configurations are examined under the two step loading path. Strain results are used to calculate transformation strain which provides a quantitative measure of phase at a material point; when transformation strain is zero, the material point is either twinned martensite, or austenite depending on the temperature. Transformation strain value of unity corresponds to detwinned martensite. A value between zero and one indicates mixed phase.
In this study, through two step loading in conjunction with transformation strain calculations, a method for mapping transient non-uniform distribution of phases in an SMA is introduced.
Ability to obtain drastically different phase distributions under same loading path by modifying the geometry is demonstrated. The failure behavior of SMAs can be designed such that the load level the crack initiates and the path it propagates can be customized.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:vcu.edu/oai:scholarscompass.vcu.edu:etd-5019 |
| Date | 01 January 2015 |
| Creators | Motte, Naren |
| Publisher | VCU Scholars Compass |
| Source Sets | Virginia Commonwealth University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Theses and Dissertations |
| Rights | © The Author |
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