THE INFLUENCE OF SURFACE-ENERGY ON STRESS-FREE MICROSTRUCTURES IN SHAPE-MEMORY ALLOYS

Certain alloys such as In-Tl, Ni-Ti, Ag-Cd or Cu-Al-Ni display remarkable mechanical properties such as the shape memory effect or pseudo-elasticity. This behaviour is related to a solid-solid phase transformation which leads to a complicated microscopic arrangement of different phases. In recent studies such microstructures have been analyzed by the minimization of elastic energy. We discuss the influence of additional surface energy terms on the existence of stress-free microstructures both in the nonlinear and a geometrically linear setting.