A Novel Powder Metallurgy Processing Approach to Prepare Fine-Grained Cu-Al-Ni Shape-Memory Alloy Strips from Elemental Powders

Abstract

The current work describes the experimental results related to the successful preparation of fine-grained, Cu-Al-Ni, high-temperature shape-memory alloy (SMA) strips from elemental Cu, Al, and Ni powders via a novel powder metallurgy (P/M) processing approach. This route consists of short time period ball milling of elemental powder mixture, preform preparation from milled powder, sintering of preforms, hot-densification rolling of unsheathed sintered powder preforms under protective atmosphere, and postconsolidation homogenization treatment of the hot-rolled strips. It has been shown that it is possible to prepare chemically homogeneous Cu-Al-Ni SMA strips consisting of equiaxed grains of average size approximately 6 μm via the current processing approach. It also has been shown that fine-grained microstructure in the finished Cu-Al-Ni SMA strips resulted from the pinning effect of nanosized alumina particles present on the grain boundaries. The finished SMA strips were almost fully martensitic in nature, consisting of a mixture of $$ \beta_{1}^{\prime } $$ - and $$ \gamma_{1}^{\prime } $$ -type martensites. The Cu-Al-Ni SMA strips had 677 MPa average fracture strength, coupled with 13 pct average fracture strain. The fractured surfaces of the specimens exhibited primarily dimpled ductile type of fracture, together with some transgranular mode of fracture. The Cu-Al-Ni strips exhibited an almost 100 pct one-way shape recovery after bending followed by unconstrained heating at 1, 2, and 4 pct applied deformation prestrain. The two-way shape-memory strain was found approximately 0.35 pct after 15 training cycles at 4 pct applied training prestrain.