Analysis of Convective Heat Transfer Coefficient on Shape Memory Alloy Actuatorunder Various Ambient Temperatures with Finite Difference Method

Abstract

The demand for shape memory alloy (SMA) actuators for technical applications is steadily increasing; however SMA may have poor deactivation time due to relatively slow convective cooling. Convection heat transfer mechanism plays a critical role in the cooling process, where an increase of air circulation around the SMA actuator (i.e. forced convection) provides a significant improvement in deactivation time compared to the natural convection condition. The rate of convective heat transfer, either natural or forced, is measured by the convection heat transfer coefficient, which may be difficult to predict theoretically due to the numerous dependent variables. In this work, a study of free convective cooling of linear SMAactuators was conducted under various ambient temperatures to experimentally determine the convective heat transfer coefficient. A finite difference equation (FDE) was developed to simulate SMA response, and calibrated with the experimental data to obtain the unknown convectiveheat transfer coefficient,h. These coefficients are then compared with the available theoretical equations, and it was found that Eisakhaniet.almodel provides good agreement with the Experiment-FDE calibrated results. Therefore, FDE is reasonably useful to estimate the convective heat transfer coefficient of SMA actuator experiments under various conditions, with a few identified limitations (e.g. exclusion of other associative heat transfer factors).