SMA Modeling for Seismic Applications

Superelastic properties of shape memory alloys (SMAs) are well-known and have been used in a wide range of commercial, aerospace, and biomedical applications. These materials have recently been assessed for use in earthquake engineering applications. When considering these materials for seismic structural applications, it is crucial to understand the level of complexity needed in the constitutive models describing the behavior of these materials to effectively and efficiently capture the highly nonlinear behavior of SMAs. This chapter first presents an overview of the main types of SMA models. Next, the chapter investigates how using various SMA constitutive models affects the seismic behavior of structural systems that use superelastic SMA devices. Three SMA models with different levels of complexity are used to conduct a sensitivity analysis. The models are evaluated using a simple structural system subjected to three sets of earthquake recordings.