Micromechanical investigations of polymer matrix composites with shape memory alloy reinforcement

In the present work, a micromechanics model was established to predict the effective time-dependent pseudoelastic responses of composites consisting of thermoviscoelastic polymer matrix and shape memory alloy (SMA) reinforcement. The incremental constitutive equations were firstly derived for polymer and SMA, respectively, and then formulated into a unified formulation. The starting point of the proposed model is to construct a variational statement which is a potential energy functional derived from the unified formulation. On account of the nonlinearity of the composites' behavior, the present model was developed based on an incremental procedure associated with the instantaneous effective tangential matrix of composites' coefficients. The present model offers an efficient tool for analyzing the SMA polymer matrix composites with arbitrary number and geometry of SMA reinforcement.