Shape Memory Alloys: Modeling and Engineering Applications

This book addresses contemporary developments in the modeling and characterization of shape memory alloys and their engineering applications, providing a review of past and present SMA-based engineering solutions, experimental methods, and modeling techniques. Shape Memory Alloys (SMAs) represent a unique material class with the ability to recover seemingly permanent deformations and provide large forces upon heating. These interesting characteristics have led to an ever-expanding variety of engineering applications which address design problems requiring high force actuation in a confined environment. Such applications range from morphing aerospace structures to deployable space antennae and solar cells to down-hole tools providing solutions for more advanced petroleum exploration methods to medical stents and other biomedical devices.