Micromechanical analysis of porous SMA

The present paper deals with computational micromechanical analyses of porous shape memory alloy (SMA). Porous SMAs are considered composite materials made of a dense SMA matrix including voids. A three-dimensional constitutive law is presented for the dense SMA able to reproduce the pseudo-elastic as well as the shape memory effects and, moreover, to account for the different elastic properties of the austenite and martensite phases. Furthermore, a numerical procedure is developed and the overall behavior of the porous SMA is recovered studying a representative volume element. Comparisons between the numerical results, recovered using the proposed modeling, and experimental data available in the literature are presented. The case of closed and open porosity is investigated. Parametric studies have been conducted in order to investigate the influence of the porosity, the shape and orientation of the pores on the overall mechanical response and, mainly, on the energy absorption dissipation capability.