Challenges in Alloying of NiTi - New Approaches for Low-Hysteresis and High Temperature SMAs

Despite the evident existence of market demand and great efforts in alloy development and processing, NiTi alloys struggle to exploit their full potential and to satisfy the high expectations from industry. Two exemplary field of research are low-hysteresis (LHSMA) and high temperature shape memory alloys (HTSMA) were many alloy solutions with promising results were proposed in the last decades, but almost none was commercialized on an industrially relevant scale. The reasons for the limited success might be manifold: Material inherent challenges like creating workable, reliable and performing alloys, cost of setting-up a stable process, trust in new technology, communication between material designer and potential end-user, lack of material provider and further drawbacks obstacle the way to commercialization.

Evidentially, existing LHSMA and HTSMA solutions suffer a lack of trust from industries to achieve commercial success. Therefore, besides developing material solutions, new ways need to be found to demonstrate the full potential of the most promising alloys and systems. From the technical point of view, demonstrator and prototypes of simple configurations that are adequate to illustrate assets and limits of such novel materials in order to convince potential end-users need to be prepared and benchmarked. To be more persuasive, the demonstrator should constitute of an application relevant shape and could be prepared by non-conventional processes if it supports the full exploitation of the material advantages. In this work, experimental case studies for LHSMA and HTSMA are reported and discussed with the aim of a more effective dissemination of alloy capabilities.