A Helmholtz free-energy function for a Cu–Al–Ni shape memory alloy

Abstract

In this paper we develop a free energy function for a Cu–Al–Ni alloy undergoing cubic–orthorhombic phase transitions. We use the irreducible Lagrangian strain polynomial invariants of the cubic austenite parent phase to construct a polynomial expansion for the Helmholtz free energy. Our expansion retains quartic terms of the strain components in order to describe the two-phase material—the cubic austenite phase and six variants of the orthorhombic martensite phase. The coefficients of the free energy polynomial function are temperature dependent and are fitted to appropriate experimental data for austenite and martensite phases from literature. The resulting Helmholtz free energy function is given by (3.20), (4.11). We examine the response predicted by the model for shear in the twinning directions.