Essay Example on Shape Memory Alloy And Morphing As advancement Continues

Shape Memory Alloy And Morphing As advancement continues in the materials being used for manufacturing of aircraft with that came a new practice morphing Morphing is where a material in our case undergoes a uniform transformation into a new shape Now morphing could be the only possibility if you have a material that can withstand undergoing transformation and hold another shape without losing its endurance These types of material are known as a shape memory alloy SMA Now to be a shape memory alloy that material should be flexible enough to change its shape when demanded and withhold its strength and perform at excess temperatures Also to have a phase change of these materials they would be experiencing the thermal or automated action Shape memory alloys are bound to have some sort of resilience in them Although shape memory alloy has been in existence for many years yet they haven't been used in any mainstream environment for that reason there aren't many shape memory alloys The main reason being no one has completely explored the elasticity of materials Nonetheless there are some studies where they conducted studies of materials elasticity 

The most common alloys used in these applications are Cu Al Ni and Ti A study done by International company Rilem conducted an experiment in testing the materials where mechanical stress is present to materials and through a stress and strain curve and along with this they also another factor of different temperatures and then they study the material characteristics below is the result of their experiment Figure 1 Rilem Experiment Results In a similar sense a study at Texas A M University was conducted where they installed shape memory alloy tubes in the wing where the purpose of this was to initiate spanwise wing twisting which is to reduce the drag during taking off So by adding a slight twist to the wing would reduce the angle of attack through the span of the wing hence reducing drag Although the result of this study was not as much as strong enough for a full scale wing Below are pictures of the SMA torque tube in a wing Figure 2 Texas A M University Study Another challenge for this shape memory alloy is the rigidity of the materials after undergoing transformations This is where a laser additive manufacturing LAM of shape memory alloy conducted by an Institute in Indore India Their study shows that composite of Ni and Ti significantly improves the phase changing transformation compared to the other materials like Cu On the other hand the manufacturing cost of this composite is quite expensive so the next step in this is to find a viable solution for manufacturing Another challenge is the type of material being used for morphing