Processing and Characterization of Cu-Al-Ni Shape Memory Alloy Strips Prepared from Prealloyed Powder by Hot Densification Rolling of Powder Preforms

The present work deals with the preparation of near-full density Cu-Al-Ni shape memory alloy (SMA) strips from argon-atomized prealloyed powder via a powder metallurgy (PM) route comprising cold die compaction to prepare powder preforms, sintering, and hot densification rolling of unsheathed sintered powder preforms under protective atmosphere at 1273 K (1000 °C). It has been shown that argon-atomized spherical Cu-Al-Ni SMA powder consisted of very fine equiaxed grains and no appreciable grain growth occurred during sintering at 1273 K (1000 °C). It also has been shown that no appreciable densification occurred during sintering, and densification was primarily achieved by hot rolling. The densification behavior of the sintered powder preforms during hot rolling was discussed. The hot-rolled Cu-Al-Ni strips were heat-treated at 1223 K (950 °C) for 60 minutes and water quenched. The heat-treated strips consisted of equiaxed grains with average size approximately 90 μm. The heat-treated Cu-Al-Ni SMA strips consisted of self-accommodated \( \beta_{1}^{'} \) martensite primarily, and showed smooth \( \beta_{1} \Rightarrow \beta_{1}^{'} \) transformation behavior coupled with a very low hysteresis (≈25 K (25 °C)). The heat-treated strips exhibited an extremely good combination of mechanical properties with fracture strength of 530 MPa and 12.3 pct fracture strain. The mode of fracture in the finished strip was primarily void-coalescence-type ductile together with some brittle transgranular type. The shape memory tests showed almost 100 pct one-way shape recovery after 100 bending-unconstrained heating cycles at 4 pct applied prestrain, exhibiting good stability of Cu-Al-Ni strips under thermomechanical actuation cycling. The two-way shape memory strain was found approximately 0.45 pct after 15 training cycles at 4 pct training strain.