Fabricação e testes de parafusos de ligas com memória de forma do sistema NiTi.

Abstract

In many situations, the bolts of a mechanical design are considered as having a secondary importance, when in fact they have fundamental aspects of its operation, once they are used within the loading limits established by the manufacturer. If not, the bolts may failure through different manners. In order to solve or minimize these problems associated with bolts, new materials have been studied, such as Shape Memory Alloys (SMA). Such alloys belong to the class of active materials and have the surprising ability to recover an "apparently plastic" strain through a subsequent heating above a critical temperature. The application of these materials has increased on many fields, due to the special properties of these alloys (Shape memory, superelasticity and others). In this context, a possible alternative to minimize or even eliminate the drawbacks associated with conventional bolts would be manufacturing these elements from SMA. In this regard, the main objective of this work was to manufacture and test bolts made of SMA from NiTi-system. The tests aimed to analyze the behavior of SMA bolts from the viewpoint of Shape Memory Effect (SME), Superelasticity (SE), and Transverse Cyclic Shear (TCS). Thus, to analyze the effects of many factors on the response variable, some of the tests were carried out according to a methodology of Design of Experiments (DOE). Based upon the results, one can establish that the SMA bolts have a strong application potential and, in this way, it was possible to attest the innovative nature of this work, which might be the basis for future studies on the field of SMA fasteners.