Experimental investigation on the vibration tuning of a shell with a shape memory alloy ring

This paper presents a new design of a smart ring with motion actuators made of a shape memory alloy (SMA). The mechanical properties of the SMA actuator were investigated at room (25 °C) and high (90 °C) temperatures to better understand its characteristics. The results show that the smart ring with an SMA not only shows good stability and rapid effectiveness in the vibration control of the test shell, but observably eliminates the nonlinear vibration characteristics due to contact and rubbing between the ring and shell during the heating process. The smart ring also shows excellent performance in the isolation of transient vibration resulting from impact or random loads. With regard to impact loads, the response peak value can reduce by 57.4% in most cases, while the value is 38.7% for random excitations. The study shows the feasibility of using the SMA material for potential applications of vibration tuning the casings of aero-engines.