Shape Memory Materials Handbook: A Guide for Developing and Designing with Shape Memory Alloys, Superelastic Alloys, Magnetic Alloys, Ceramics, and Polymers

When designing a new material or selecting an existing material for an application, the typical first step is to use material handbooks, databases, or other guides to narrow down possible materials that may fit the requirements. This process is common for materials such as steels and aluminums, but unfortunately the lack of a single-source handbook for shape memory materials (SMMs) requires researchers to down-select by searching through tens or hundreds of published articles and documents to determine a viable material. The lack of such a guide has created many challenges for SMM researchers when finding and comparing data, avoiding possible duplication of research, and identifying gaps within the research. To remedy this, the authors present for the first time the Shape Memory Materials Handbook, available digitally for free to the public. The handbook presents useful data and information for shape memory alloys (SMAs), superelastic alloys, magnetic shape memory alloys (MSMAs), shape memory ceramics (SMCs) and shape memory polymers (SMPs) to assist researchers in developing new materials or selecting an existing material for an application. The chapters provide useful comparison plots, showing all base-systems compared to one another (comparing transformation temperatures for all SMAs for example). Lastly, the handbook provides readers with several useful special topics, including additively manufactured SMAs, hysteresis, and elastocaloric alloys. The culmination of this work is intended to work hand-in-hand with NASA’s free online shape memory materials database (https://shapememory.grc.nasa.gov/) to assist researchers in selecting or designing with SMMs to reduce time, cost, and duplication of work.