An Overview of Smart Material Systems and Structures

This chapter presents a comprehensive overview of smart material systems and structures, focusing on their adaptive behaviors and multiphysics couplings. It introduces the concept of smart materials, which exhibit unique properties due to the coupling of mechanical and non-mechanical fields. The chapter delves into various types of smart materials, including piezoelectric materials with electromechanical coupling and shape memory alloys with thermomechanical coupling. It discusses the remarkable properties of these materials, such as the ability of shape memory alloys to recover their shape after deformation and the ability of piezoelectric materials to generate electrical charges in response to mechanical loads. The chapter also explores the applications of these materials in different fields, such as aerospace, biomedical, and energy harvesting. It highlights innovative applications like earthquake-resistant structures using shape memory alloys and energy harvesting systems using piezoelectric materials. The chapter concludes by emphasizing the need for a deep understanding of the complex nonlinear dynamics of smart materials to design effective and efficient systems.