With the development of morphing and adaptive structures, there is increased attention on the application of such systems in the civil and aerospace fields, especially where a deployable application is of interest. The control of shape and stiffness of these structures can be achieved through several actuation mechanisms using smart materials such as shape memory alloys (SMA), piezoelectric active fiber composites, etc. In this work, we study the vibration response of a bi-morph SMA reinforced composite with controlled current input. The composite consists of two layers of SMA reinforcements with 0^o^ and 90^o^ orientation angles and the temperatures of these layers are raised through Joule heating, first individually, followed by combined actuation, where the current supply is controlled using a programmable DC supply. It is well known from an equivalent model that in the low-frequency range such responses are predominantly stiffness controlled. As the material properties of SMA are temperature dependent, we observe thermal contraction and a resulting increase in laminate stiffness. The change of compliance contributes to change in the natural frequency of the composite at different temperatures. This behavior is recorded and reported in this paper. Design parameters to achieve desirable active/semi-active vibration control are discussed and a parametric study involving various SMA fiber angle orientations and varying SMA fiber volume fractions is also presented through numerical investigation. The aim of this work is to achieve autonomous vibration control of structures by utilizing a temperature range as a defining parameter.


Vibration Response Studies of Bi-Morph SMA Hybrid Composite Using 3D Laser Doppler Vibrometer

Division / Sponsors: 
Aerospace Division

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/SMASIS/SMASIS2020/volume/84027

SMASIS2020 - Virtual Conference

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.