STRUCTURE CALCULATIONS APPLIED TO SHAPE-MEMORY ALLOYS

Despite the potential of these alloys and the amount of patents, successful industrial and commercial applications of Shape Memory Alloys (SMA) remain exceptions. This can be explained by the lack of design tools able to dimension correctly SMA elements because the non elastic behavior of SMA lead the classical method of design to be inefficient. Furthermore, this behavior is strongly dependent on temperature and exhibits hysteresis. From the definition of constitutive equations describing the superelastic behavior for an homogeneous stress field, we derive a scheme of resolution for mechanical devices. Results obtained by this way are compared with experimental observations performed on Cu- based alloys.