A New Thermoelastic Model for Analysis of Shape Memory Alloy Hybrid Composites

A constitutive model and a finite element formulation are developed for predicting the thermomechanical response of SMA hybrid composite structures subjected to combined thermal and mechanical loads. The constitutive model is valid for constrained, restrained, or free recovery behavior with appropriate measurements of basic SMA material properties. The model captures the material nonlinearity of the SMA with temperature and more accurately captures the mechanics of composites with embedded SMA actuators as compared to other recently developed approaches. The constitutive and finite element models are amenable to commercial code implementation. The fundamental thermoelastic behavior of such structures is described in physical terms and related to the governing equations. It is shown that alloy selection is imperative for achieving the desired performance with respect to the application environment. It is also shown that fundamental efforts to strategically place actuators can produce dramatic performance improvements. Numerical results are shown for glass-epoxy beam specimens with embedded Nitinol actuators. Control of critical buckling temperature, thermal post-buckling deflection, and random response are demonstrated.