Lowering the Power Consumption of Ni-Ti Shape Memory Alloy

Shape memory alloy (SMA) wires are capable of providing contractile strain mimicking the functionality of muscle fibers. They are promising for the development of biomimetic robots due to their high power density and desired form factor. However, they suffer from significantly high power consumption. The focus of this paper was to address this drawback associated with SMAs. Two different parameters were investigated in this study: i) lowering of the martensite to austentite phase transition temperatures and ii) the reduction of the thermal hysteresis. For an equiatomic Ni-Ti alloy, replacing nickel with 10 at% copper reduces the thermal hysteresis by 50% or more. For NiTi alloys with nickel content greater than 50 at%, transition temperature decreases linearly at a rate of 100 degrees C/Ni at%. Given these two power reducing factors, an alloy with composition of Ni40+xTi50-xCu10 was synthesized with x = 0, +/-1, +/-2, +/-3, +/-4, +/-5. Metal powders were melted in an argon atmosphere using an RF induction furnace to produce ingots. All the synthesized samples were characterized by differential scanning calorimetric (DSC) analysis to reveal martensite to austenite and austenite to martensite transition temperatures during heating and cooling cycles respectively. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) was conducted to identify the density and microstructure of the fractured samples. The alloy composition and synthesis method presented in this preliminary work shows the possibility of achieving low power consuming, high performance SMAs.