The Investigation of a Shape Memory Alloy Micro-Damper for MEMS Applications

Some shape memory alloys like NiTi show noticeable high damping property inpseudoelastic range. Due to its unique characteristics, a NiTi alloy is commonly used forpassive damping applications, in which the energy may be dissipated by the conversion frommechanical to thermal energy. This study presents a shape memory alloy based micro-damper, which exploits the pseudoelasticity of NiTi wires for energy dissipation. Themechanical model and functional principle of the micro-damper are explained in detail.Moreover, the mechanical behavior of NiTi wires subjected to various temperatures, strainrates and strain amplitudes is observed. Resulting from those experimental results, thedamping properties of the micro-damper involving secant stiffness, energy dissipation andloss factor are analyzed. The result indicates the proposed NiTi based micro-damper exhibitsgood energy dissipation ability, compared with conventional materials damper.