Photostress analysis of stress-induced martensite phase transformation in superelastic NiTi

Phase transformation in shape memory alloys is the most important factor in their unique behavior. In this paper, the formation of stress induced martensite phase transformation in a superelastic NiTi (50.8% Ni) shape memory alloy was investigated by using the photo-stress method. First, the material's fabrication procedure has been described and then the material was studied using the metallurgical tests such as differential scanning calorimetry and X-ray diffraction to characterize the material features and the mechanical tensile test to investigate the superelastic behavior. As a new method in observation of the phase transformation, photo-stress pictures showed the formation of stress induced martensite in a superelastic dog-bone specimen during loading and subsequently it's disappearing during unloading. Finally, finite element analysis was implemented using the constitutive equations derived based on the Boyd-Lagoudas phenomenological model.