1. Introduction
Shape Memory Alloys (SMA) are being used extensively for different purposes in this decade and the research projects on them have a broad range, varying form metallurgical issues involved in their damping mechanisms to research which investigates the technologies for SMA joining [
1,
2]. Also, their application field ranges from hybridizing techniques in composite structures in order to customize specific material performances, to more advanced fields such as micro actuation systems. In many studies, they have been used for vibration control purposes by employing an active or a passive strategy [
3,
4,
5,
6].
A comprehensive review on this issue is available in [
7]. In [
8] Birman illustrated a two-step approach in the strength and stiffness analyses of fibre reinforced particulate-matrix composites obtained through a generalization of available micromechanical solutions available for three-phase materials. The numerical analysis shows that adding stiff particles to the matrix results in a significant enhancement of the transverse strength and stiffness. Balapgol et al. [
9] investigated the natural frequencies of a multilayer SMA laminated composite cantilever plate identifying the thickness of the SMA layer, the position of the SMA layer, the temperature of the SMA and the span-to-depth ratio all playing important roles in controlling the free vibration of the SMA/elastomer actuator. The advantages of using the damping capacity of thermoelastic martensite in shape memory alloys is discussed in [
10]. In [
11,
12,
13,
14] martensitic SMA sheets were embedded into Glass Fiber Reinforced Polymer (GFRP) beams to passively enhance the damping of the system. While the concept of hybridization for enhancing the damping of the structures dates back to 40 years ago [
15], SMA hybridized systems are considered as newcomers in this field. However, since these materials receive more attention in the field of vibration control, more suitable numerical models are required in order to study the damping behaviour of material and systems integrated with SMA materials.
Regardless of the different physical mechanisms involved, all real materials dissipate some level of energy, no matter how little, during cycling deformation. Generally, such effect is highly nonlinear and related to many factors such as temperature, frequency, strain, and strain rate, while the linear behaviour assumption has only a limited application. A plot of instantaneous stress vs instantaneous strain, for all values of time during a steady-state of forced vibration tests, is referred to as a hysteresis cycle and is a well established experimental approach in classifying and quantifying the internal damping behaviour of materials. Metals alloys, as well as severe high damping alloys, show elliptical hysteresis cycles with linear damping, including viscous damping, hysteretic damping, and linear rate depending damping, while the hysteresis cycles show a more sophisticated shape with a nonlinear damping (
Figure 1) [
16]. In case of SMA materials, frequency and amplitude dependencies of damping dependencies have been reported in many studies [
12,
17]. The intrinsic amplitude-dependent damping is associated to two different phenomena: pseudo-elasticity and the dissipation of energy in the martensitic state (
Figure 2). The former occurs in SMA materials with an austenitic phase at their operating regime, where the stress-induced martensite will generate the pseudo-elastic behaviour of the material, while the latter occurs in the SMAs with a martensitic microstructure at operating regime. The high damping values reported in this case were ascribed to the high density of mobile twins and mobile interfaces [
10].
There are several numerical and experimental studies in the literature which investigate the damping on the basis of a pseudoelastic behaviour of SMAs. Micromechanical models which consider phase transformation are extensively used in this case [
18,
19,
20,
21,
22]. Nonetheless, stable martensitic microstuctural conditions have more practical advantages for applications with limited stress and strain fields, such as the application of the hybridized composites for passive damping [
10], where the phase transformation could cause micro-damage in the composite matrix.
The damping in the martensitic state has received less attention and accurate models are not available. With the aim to model amplitude-dependent damping of SMA in martensitic phase, and to use this model in numerical analysis of component made by hybrid composite [
23], a classical approach to model material damping is proposed. The techniques available in the literature in order to model the material damping are usually limited to a linearity assumption. Adams and Bacon [
24] illustrated a damping evaluation process in which energy dissipation was described as separable dissipations inside components. This was then developed and used in other works such us [
25,
26]. In the case of high damping materials or large structures with high amplitude vibrations the amplitude-dependent damping cannot be neglected and the linear assumption is no longer accurate. In [
27] the nonlinear forced vibration analysis of laminated composite beams is investigated by developing numerical methods. In [
28] four different damping models are compared, and a solid model of linear viscoelasticity is proposed, as it is more suitable for investigating the nonlinear damping.
This study applied a methodology based on modelling nonlinearity damping through the modelling of a material’s hysteresis behaviours. A phenomenological model, based on a modified version of Masing’s rules, has been developed to reproduce SMA’s hysteresis cycle at low strain ranges when they are in a martensitic state. The model was implemented in a user material subroutine for the Abaqus finite elements commercial code. To validate the material model, the hysteresis cycles reproduced numerically were compared with the hysteresis cycles obtained through experiments at different maximum strain levels. Finally, the validated model was used to simulate the free decay of SMA/GFRP hybrid beams.
2. Materials
The SMA alloys under study are Ni
40Ti
50Cu
10 and Cu
66Zn
24Al
10. They were produced previously in the laboratory by means of a vacuum induction using high purity metal powders [
11,
12]. The transformation temperatures, through the Differential Scanning Calorimetry (Q100 DSC, TA Instruments, New Castle, England) are reported in
Table 1. Both alloys are in a martensitic phase at ambient temperature.
The damping of these materials was investigated through cyclic tensile tests which were performed on sheets sized 200 mm × 20 mm × 0.2 mm at room temperature and at a different maximum strain amplitude, with an MTS hydraulic machine equipped with a 5 kN load cell. The strain measurements were performed using a 50-mm extensometer gauge length at 0.05 Hz. More details on the experimental tests are reported in [
11,
12].
Figure 3 shows the nonlinear stress–strain behaviour of the investigated materials at different strain amplitudes. As assumption to formulate the damping model based on hysteresis cycles, at each series of test at new value of maximum strain amplitude the irrecoverable strain observed before the cycle stabilization has been neglected. The investigated amplitude range for two different materials are determined from the strain amplitude range observed in vibrating condition as they are embedded in a beam shape composite structure as reported in [
11,
12]. As the elastic modulus of Ni
40Ti
50Cu
10 is lower than the elastic modulus of Cu
66Zn
24Al
10, the strain range investigated in the case of Ni
40Ti
50Cu
10 is higher than the one of Cu
66Zn
24Al
10. Both Ni
40Ti
50Cu
10 and Cu
66Zn
24Al
10 alloys exhibit a high dependency of the total dissipated energy on strain, whereas the dependency on the frequency is much smaller and can be neglected. The nonlinear behaviour observed accounts for a high level of dissipated energy, in contrast with the small strain nonlinearity, also observed in typical constructional metals [
29], but associated with extremely thin loading–unloading loops. Moreover, the experimental hysteresis cycles provide the following relevant evidence:
at each maximum strain level the cycle is fully reversible and reproducible at each maximum strain level;
the cyclic loading path always follows the backbone curve;
each new series of cycles at a given maximum strain is not affected by a previous series of cycles at different maximum strain levels.
Recently, this type of hysteresis has been classified as kinking nonlinear elastic hysteresis [
11,
30,
31]. For a large class of solids, including graphite, titanium, magnesium, cobalt, and sapphire, it has been attributed to the formation of dislocation-based incipient kink bands with multiple parallel dislocation loops, where dislocations segments of opposite signs are present on either side. The idea related to the incipient kink bands is that there is a threshold stress needed to nucleate them and removing the load results in their spontaneous collapse and a return of the microstructure to the virgin state.
With regard to the materials investigated, there is no experimental evidence that this mechanism may be the physical origin of the energy dissipation, except that the actual coarse grained microstructure dissipates more than the previously investigated fine-grained counterparts, and a non-cyclic softening is observed after more than 100 cycles at the same maximum strain amplitude.
This study used the experimental hysteresis cycles with related properties, for Ni
40Ti
50Cu
10 and Cu
66Zn
24Al
10 alloys, with the aim to model the nonlinear and frequency independent damping for a small strain range (less than 0.4%) and moderate range of frequencies regardless of the internal mechanisms [
32].
3. Model of the Nonlinear Damping Behaviour
To model the nonlinear damping, viscoelastic material models such as Kelvin–Voigt, a standard linear solid or Boltzmann’s models were used [
28]. Although the mentioned models can model a high dependency of the total dissipated energy on the strain, their sometimes poor accuracy and difficulty to identify the model parameters are drawbacks. Few researchers have focused on the use of phenomenological nonlinear damping models. Gottlieb and Habib [
33] used a phenomenological nonlinear damping model to understand the large amplitude vibrations of a spherical pendulum. Eichler et al. [
27] used a damping model containing a nonlinear term proportional to the square of the vibration amplitude multiplied by the velocity. Recently, Amabili [
34] derived a nonlinear damping model based on a fractional standard linear solid material.
In this study, with the aim to model an amplitude-dependent damping for the materials investigated, a frequency-independent phenomenological model for elastic hysteresis was developed and fitted with the experimental results. The developed model is a modified version of Masing’s theory as the principal hysteresis rule. Masing’s rules were originally introduced in 1926 [
35] and then extended by Karmer [
36] in 1966 to four statements (
Figure 4a):
For an initial loading in a cyclic test, the stress strain path follows the backbone curves:
where
is called backbone function.
If a stress reversal occurs at a point defined by (
,
), the stress strain path will be given by:
If the loading curve intersects the backbone curve, it follows the backbone curve until the following stress reversal.
If an unloading or reloading curve crosses an unloading or reloading curve from the previous cycle, the stress–strain curve follows that of the previous cycle.
A modified formulation of Masing’s second rule was suggested by G. Muravskii [
37] as:
where
is called hysteresis function.
Different researchers have introduced in literature several hysteresis functions, each of which proposed particular behaviours [
32,
38]. For example, the one introduced by Puzrin and Burland [
39] and the one proposed by Pyke [
40], where cycles become symmetrical after an increase in their number, are suitable for describing the behaviour of granular materials. All the mentioned cases are developed for materials with non-elastic hysteresis behaviours, relating to irreversible physical mechanisms. The parameters of the hysteresis functions are obtained on the basis of
function, calculated by using the initial loading curve. Consequently, none of the mentioned material models can be implemented to reproduce the nonlinear damping behaviour associated with an elastic hysteresis cycle as observed in Ni
40Ti
50Cu
10 and Cu
66Zn
24Al
10 alloys.
As mentioned, in the case of elastic-hysteresis cycles, the initial loading curve (backbone curve) is identical to the loading path of the hysteresis cycle, and a distinguished backbone curve is not available. To solve this problem, the authors have proposed the following hysteresis function:
where the parameters
represent, respectively, the average elastic modulus, the initial elastic modulus, and the maximum strain (See
Figure 4b) of the hysteresis cycle available with the highest amplitude, which hereafter is mentioned as hysteresis of reference. The proposed function guarantees lens shaped cycle as observed in the cyclic tensile tests for the materials investigated (
Figure 3). For a fixed
higher value of
would result in larger hysteresis cycles and a consequent higher damping value. Considering Equation (
4) as the hysteresis function, the elastic modulus of the material for each strain increment would be equal to:
To model the behaviour observed for the investigated materials, using the proposed model, a user subroutine SMA-UMAT.for of Abaqus Finite Element (FE) commercial code was developed, and following rules were implemented:
The flowchart of the subroutine developed is presented in
Figure 5.
4. Validation of the Material Model
The parameters of the modified Masing model (Equation (
4)) were identified through the experimental reference hysteresis cycles presented in
Figure 6 which corresponds to the largest cycles in
Figure 3, for Ni
40Ti
50Cu
10 and Cu
66Zn
24Al
10, respectively, and are reported in
Table 2.
For each composition, the validity of the developed model was proven by comparing the numerical hysteresis loops with additional experimental hysteresis cycles at different amplitudes. The numerical cycles were obtained by simulating, with a plain stress FE model of the specimen, the same condition of experimental cyclic tensile tests explained in the previous section devoted to Materials. The comparison between the experimental and numerical hysteresis loops is reported in
Figure 7a for tests on Ni
40Ti
50Cu
10, and in
Figure 7b for tests on Cu
66Zn
24Al
10. Three experimental and numerical cycles are represented in each case for comparison. By definition, amplitude of cycle is considered equal to half of maximum stain level of the cycle. A good agreement between the numerical and experimental results is observed. For more comparison, the corresponding loss factor and average elastic modulus of both numerically and experimentally obtained cycles, were calculated and compared. The loss factor corresponding to the hysteresis cycle is given by:
where
is the dissipated energy for each cycle, equal to the enclosed area of the hysteresis cycle, and
is the maximum elastic energy stored for each cycle. The loss factors calculated for both materials, and for the cycles with different amplitudes, are compared in in
Table 3 and
Table 4. In both cases, the experimental strain-dependent loss factor of the materials was replicated with a good degree of accuracy.
The corresponding average elastic modulus of each hysteresis cycle was also obtained as:
where
and
are the maximum stress and strain of the hysteresis cycles respectively. The average elastic modulus calculated, corresponding to experimental and numerical hysteresis cycles, are compared in
Table 3 and
Table 4. Obviously, for larger cycles lower values were obtained, but excellent accuracy was achieved. The error was never more than 4%.
6. Conclusions
A phenomenological model was developed, by implementing a modified Masing model for an elastic hysteresis behaviour, in order to evaluate the amplitude-dependent damping of Ni40Ti50Cu10 and Cu66Zn24Al10 shape memory alloys in a martensitic state. The hysteresis cycle, for different maximum strain amplitudes, was reproduced numerically for a sample under tensile test and the results were validated with corresponding experimental data.
The validated material model was implemented in a user subroutine of the Abaqus FE Code, and then used to simulate the free decay of the hybrid composite structure in the shape of encastred beams.
The amplitude-dependent damping of the beams was reproduced successfully, confirming that the damping model can be used effectively for accurate numerical simulations of the dynamic behaviour of complex hybrid composite structures.