Finite element modeling of the damping capacity and vibration behavior of cellular shape memory alloy

Owing to the dissipative phase transformation and the porosity characteristics, cellular shape memory alloy (SMA) shows high damping capacity and thereby superior performance in vibration control. This paper studies the damping capacity and vibration behavior of the cellular SMA by means of the unit-cell finite element method. A material model of dense SMA is employed to simulate the thermodynamic behavior of the cellular SMA. A loss factor ω is introduced to evaluate the damping capacity of cellular SMA in a successive loading-unloading cycle. The effects of the material properties (the stress difference between the forward and reverse transformations, the saturated value of the transformation strain), the ambient temperature and the pore morphology (the porosity and the axial ratio of spheroid pore) on the damping capacity are investigated. Besides, the cellular SMA with randomly distributed pores is also considered. Simulation results well demonstrate the high damping capacity of the cellular SMA due to the local dissipative martensite phase transformation. Finally, by comparison of the free vibration behavior between the cellular SMA beam and the elastic beam, the cellular SMA exhibits superior performance in vibration control.