Nitinol Material Calibration in Abaqus/CAE

Abaqus has the first and most widely used material model for Nitinol superelastic alloy. The material model in Abaqus consists of both superelastic and superelastic-plastic constitutive behaviors. To use the material model, the users need to calibrate the material model to find out the correct material constants based on the test data. Currently, the users have to rely on 3rd party tools to achieve this and bring the material constants into Abaqus manually or through a script. The objective of this study is to develop an Abaqus/CAE user interface extension that imports Nitinol test data, calculates the material constants based on a few characteristics points the user picks interactively on the stress-strain curve, creates and executes a test model and plots the simulation results over the original test data for comparison. The extension will also automatically create a material and generate the appropriate keywords inside the Abaqus/CAE database. This new extension will significantly simplify simulation workflows that employ the Abaqus Nitinol material model.