Investigation of Damping Properties of NiTi and NiTi-based SMA Samples: Correlation with Microstructure and Perspectives in Aerospace and Biomedical Applications

In the last years the damping properties of the SMA alloys have attracted increasing interest for the development of particular devices principally in civil applications. Moreover the aerospace and biomedical field expressed new challenges to solve damping problems. In this work we studied in deep the possibility to modulate the damping performance of shape memory NiTi and NiTi-based alloys. Particularly we investigated the influence of different microstructures on damping frequencies and internal friction coefficient values. Beside the microstructural investigation using thermal and microscopic analysis we use dynamic thermal analysis in different kind of test configuration. The dynamic tests have been carried out in low frequencies range until to 100 Hz. Finally the perspective for some proofs of concept in aerospace and biomedical field are proposed and the first investigation of the feasibility studies is proposed.