Fabrication and Characterization of Nitinol Reinforced Metal Matrix Smart Composite: A Review

Metal matrix composites are becoming more popular in various industrial, automobile, naval, and aircraft applications because of their unmatchable mechanical and thermo-mechanical properties. Smart materials are known to have extra ordinary material properties which made the evolution of a new generation of materials. Shape memory alloys are the one among these smart materials which are capable of memorizing their previous shape and able to recover the plastic deformation. Nitinol is the most widely used shape memory alloy which has maximum recoverable strain among the shape memory alloys and has excellent mechanical and thermo mechanical properties. With the reinforcement of nitinol, in metal alloys, properties like high tensile strength, high fatigue strength, improved damping properties, and the very precious property of damage healing in metals, can be achieved. This review article presents a review on nitinol reinforced metal matrix composite which includes (a) mathematical and finite element method models; (b) fabrication method; (c) mechanical characterization that includes tensile behavior, interfacial bonding, and damping capacity. This paper tries to covers most of the relevant works related to nitinol reinforced metal matrix composites. However the more focus is given to the aluminium metal alloys reinforced with nitinol fiber.