Evolution of thermal and mechanical properties of Nitinol wire as a function of ageing treatment conditions

As-received and cold-worked 55Ni–45Ti wt% Nitinol wire samples were subjected to various ageing treatments. Experiments show that the properties of as-received Nitinol, including microstructure, critical temperatures in thermally induced phase transformation, and critical stresses/strains in mechani...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wang, Z, Everaerts, J, Salvati, E, Korsunsky, A
Format: Journal article
Language:English
Published: Elsevier 2019
Description
Summary:As-received and cold-worked 55Ni–45Ti wt% Nitinol wire samples were subjected to various ageing treatments. Experiments show that the properties of as-received Nitinol, including microstructure, critical temperatures in thermally induced phase transformation, and critical stresses/strains in mechanically induced phase transformation, change significantly after ageing process at 773 K for different durations ranging from 10 min to 5 h. BSE and EBSD/EDS analysis shows that the predominant microstructural evolution is a large increase in Ni4Ti3 precipitate volume fraction, while grain growth is negligible. DSC results show that as-received material exhibits little to no phase transformation during heating-cooling cycling at 5K/min, while various ageing durations lead to the emergence of phase transformation that occurs at different critical temperatures. Tensile loading experiments conducted using a test rig equipped with a heater revealed the evolution of mechanically induced phase transformation behaviour. Mathematical models are proposed to predict the dependence of critical temperatures and critical stresses/strains on the ageing treatment conditions and alloy composition.