A Review of Recent Development of Shape Memory Alloys and Technology for Industrial Applications

Shape Memory Alloys present a mature technology serving a lot of industrial applications, especially in the automotive, consumer electronics, household appliances and building automation sectors.  Many products show the intrinsic advantages of this smart material, such as miniaturization, simplification, high performance, structural integration and cost reduction.  In the last 2 years industrial applications have increased dramatically and nowadays engineers are starting to design using this technology as a good alternative as controllable actuators.  In this review several commercial products will be presented.  For further expanding the market of the engineering products, the main challenges for the near future is the continuous improvement of the alloys; especially high temperature deformable alloys are needed to be developed for future micro-actuators.  Recent development of such high temperature alloys will be also reviewed.