Recent Advances in Shape-Memory Materials and Actuators

A special issue of Actuators (ISSN 2076-0825). This special issue belongs to the section "Actuator Materials".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 April 2023) | Viewed by 1644

Special Issue Editors


E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA
Interests: soft robotics; smart materials; swarm robots
Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Riverside, 900 University Ave, Riverside, CA 92521, USA
Interests: surgical robotics; soft robotics; smart materials

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Inspired by natural muscles, “artificial muscles” (e.g., shape memory alloy, shape memory polymer, and liquid crystal elastomer) that can “memorize” their original shape and stiffness, and recover from deformation in response to external stimulation have drawn massive attention in the past decades. Such actuators have been widely applied in the field of robotics, bioengineering, and aerospace engineering, where compliance, compactness, or minimum auxiliary power and control electronics are required. However, the bottlenecks like low actuation bandwidth, intermediate actuation strain, and poor energy efficiency can restrict their further applications.

The Special Issue will provide a forum for the latest research activities in the field of shape memory actuators, materials, and their applications to address these challenges. Both review articles and original research papers are solicited in, though not limited to, the following areas:

  • Novel design of shape memory actuators;
  • New shape memory materials;
  • Modeling, control, and sensing of shape memory actuators;
  • Novel methods to improve the performance of shape memory actuators and materials;
  • Emerging applications of shape memory actuators and materials;

Dr. Xiaonan (Sean) Huang
Dr. Jun Sheng
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Actuators is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • shape memory actuator
  • shape memory materials
  • soft robotics
  • microrobots
  • medical robotics
  • bioengineering
  • aerospcace engineering

Published Papers (1 paper)

Order results
Result details
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:

Research

30 pages, 8235 KiB  
Article
Investigations of the Crystallographic Orientation on the Martensite Variant Reorientation of the Single-Crystal Ni-Mn-Ga Cube and Its Composites for Actuator Applications
by Wan-Ting Chiu, Motoki Okuno, Masaki Tahara, Tomonari Inamura and Hideki Hosoda
Actuators 2023, 12(5), 211; https://doi.org/10.3390/act12050211 - 20 May 2023
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 1218
Abstract
High-speed actuators are greatly required in this decade due to the fast development of future technologies, such as Internet-of-Things (IoT) and robots. The ferromagnetic shape memory alloys (FSMAs), whose shape change could be driven by applying an external magnetic field, possess a rapid [...] Read more.
High-speed actuators are greatly required in this decade due to the fast development of future technologies, such as Internet-of-Things (IoT) and robots. The ferromagnetic shape memory alloys (FSMAs), whose shape change could be driven by applying an external magnetic field, possess a rapid response. Hence, these materials are considered promising candidates for the applications of future technologies. Among the FSMAs, the Ni-Mn-Ga-based materials were chosen for their large shape deformation strain and appropriate phase transformation temperatures for near-room temperature applications. Nevertheless, it is widely known that both the intrinsic brittleness of the Ni-Mn-Ga alloy and the constraint of shape deformation strain due to the existence of grain boundaries in the polycrystal inhibit the applications. Therefore, various Ni-Mn-Ga-based composite materials were designed in this study, and their shape deformation behaviors induced by compressive or magnetic fields were examined by the in situ micro CT observations. In addition, the dependence of the martensite variant reorientation (MVR) on the crystallographic directions was also investigated. It was found that most of the MVRs are active within the magnetic field range applied in the regime of the <100>p, <110>p, and <111>p of the single-crystal {100}p Ni-Mn-Ga cubes. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances in Shape-Memory Materials and Actuators)
Show Figures

Figure 1

Back to TopTop