BENDING OF SUPERELASTIC WIRES .1. EXPERIMENTAL ASPECTS

A pure-bending apparatus is used to measure the constitutive relationship between applied pure bending moments and the resulting curvatures of a few superelastic alloy wires. The sample nickel-titanium alloy (NiTi) wires change phase when ample bending moments are imposed. Like the material's uniaxial tension stress-strain relationship, the measured moment-curvature relationship shows plateaus of constant moment and hysteresis. The bent shape is circular, except in the mixed phase region where it is composed of a phase mixture of circles. An example of the applications of the measured moment-curvature relations is presented in Part II of this paper where the three-point bending problem is considered.