Foundations of Shape-Memory Materials and Structures

This book presents the fundamentals of crystalline shape memory materials and structures made thereof, focusing attention on models useful from the viewpoint of structural analysis and their numerical realization. The book is a self-contained presentation of parts of this intriguing subject and is useful as an introduction to newcomers to the field. It is split in four parts. The first part describes the basic concepts of continuum mechanics and thermodynamics as well as the mathematical notions and computational techniques which are applied in the sequel. Part two is concerned with the mechanical behavior of structural elements within the range of elasticity. Herein the finite element method is presented in detail for structural boundary value problems and its approximation properties are illustrated. After these preliminaries, the shape-memory materials are considered and various theoretical models are developed that take in account the characteristic pseudoelastic hysteretic loops. Part four presents the behavior of various structures (trusses, rods, beams, disks, plates) made of shape-memory materials. The book deals both with the modeling of continuum and structural mechanics problems and the aspects of their computer implementation, and includes many numerical examples that demonstrate the application of the methodologies described. It introduces modern modeling techniques and shows how these techniques can be implemented in computational mechanics of real-world problems. Foundations of Shape-Memory Materials and Structures: Modeling and numerics will be of interest to postgraduate and graduate students of civil, mechanical and materials engineering as well as research engineers and scientists working in this fascinating field.