THERMO-MECHANICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF COMPOSITES REINFORCED WITH SHAPE MEMORY ALLOY WIRES—RESEARCH ON SMART COMPOSITES

Composites reinforced with Shape Memory Alloy(SMA)wires employ the SMA wires as distributed actuators to achieve adaptive functions while in service.This paper presents at heoretical study on the thermo-mechanical characteristics of composites reinforced with SMA wires,based on the one-dimensional constitutive relation of SMA.Experimental results derived from tension,free recovery and rest rained recovery of composites reinforced with SMA wires are also presented and compared with the simulated results.