Thermal stabilization of Shape Memory alloy wires

We show that fast, localized heating and cooling of a Shape Memory material can provide a very effective means of damping vibrational energy. We model the thermally induced pseudo-elastic behavior of a NiTi Shape Memory wire using a variant of the Landau-Devonshire potential. We assume that the wire consists of martensitic NiTi single crystals. Dynamically, we model the material response using conservation of momentum and a nonlinear heat equation. We use a frame invariant version of the Fourier heat flux which incorporates dependence on the atomic lattice through the strain. In the settings used in this paper, the computational experiments confirm that circa 80% of the vibrational energy can be eliminated at the moment of the onset of the thermally induced phase transition.