SMA Hybrid Composites for Dynamic Response Abatement Applications

Abstract

A recently developed constitutive model and a finite element formulation for predicting the thermomechanical response of shape memory alloy hybrid composite (SMAHC) structures are briefly described. Attention is focused on constrained recovery behavior in this study, but the constitutive formulation is also applicable to modeling restrained or free recovery. Numerical results are shown for glass-epoxy panel specimens with embedded Nitinol actuators subjected to thermal and acoustic loads. Control of thermal buckling, random response, sonic fatigue, and noise transmission are demonstrated and compared to conventional approaches including addition of conventional composite layers and a constrained layer damping treatment. The SMAHC approach is shown to be significantly more effective in the dynamic response abatement applications than the conventional approaches. The impetus for the control is an extremely weight-efficient stiffening effect, which makes the SMAHC approach ideally suited for the difficult problem of low-frequency vibration and noise control. Extremely wideband control may be possible by combined SMAHC-conventional or SMAHC-active approaches because of the complementary control mechanisms.