Investigation of the damping behavior of shape memory alloy-nitinol reinforced composite

Abstract

The use of Shape Memory Alloy (SMA) recently increased in smart structures. It is essential to investigate the impact of viscoelastic material, and transformation temperatures of SMA on dynamic behavior, especially the damping capability of the SMA reinforced composite. In this paper, the damping constants of SMA and viscoelastic material are evaluated experimentally, and a damping model based on experimental results is proposed for the composite. The effect of SMA wires in combination and selective activation has been studied using the proposed model and validated experimentally. It has been observed that damping predicted by the model is close to damping calculated by experimentation. Also, damping varies with the transformation temperatures of SMA. Thus, dynamic control of the SMA reinforced composite is feasible by controlling transformation temperature. The composite studied in this work can shift the damping by 9.58% by activating all nitinol wires.