Applications of the directional solidification in magnetic shape memory alloys

Abstract

A zone melting liquid metal cooling (ZMLMC) method of directional solidification was applied to prepare highly-oriented Ni52Fe17Ga27Co4 magnetic shape memory alloys. At high temperature gradient and low growth velocity, the well-developed preferred orientation for coarse columnar crystals was obtained. Such a structure leads to a large complete pseudoelastic recovery of 5% at 348 K. Moreover, the pseudoelastic behaviours and the kinetics of the martensitic transformation (MT) are significantly affected by the intersection angle between the loading direction and the grain boundaries.