Fatigue life study of superelastic NiTi Shape Memory Alloys using self-heating under cyclic loading method

Abstract

This paper concerns the High Cycle Fatigue (HCF) properties of superelastic NiTi Shape Memory Alloys (SMA). Up till today, HCF fatigue of SMAs has not been much studied and, therefore, there is a lack of tools to design the SMA pieces and structures against fatigue. In this study, it is proposed to investigate the HCF properties of NiTi SMAs by using a new approach based, on one hand, on self-heating tests under cyclic loading and, on the other hand, on a probabilistic two-scale model. The proposed model permits to establish a link between self-heating phenomena and the fatigue properties of the material. Finally, our approach is validated by comparing the model predictions to the experimental results obtained with classical HCF fatigue tests.