Response of porous SMA: a micromechanical study

Lately porous shape memory alloys (SMA) have attracted great interest as low weight materials characterized by high energy dissipation capability. In the present contribution a micromechanical study of porous SMA is proposed, introducing the simplifying hypothesis of periodic distribution of voids. The mechanical response of the heterogeneous porous medium is derived by performing nonlinear finite element micromechanical analyses considering a typical repetitive unit cell made of a circular hole in a dense SMA matrix and prescribing suitable periodicity and continuity conditions. The constitutive behavior and the dissipation energy capability of the porous Nitinol are examined for several porosity levels. Numerical applications are performed in order to test the ability of the proposed procedure to well capture the overall behavior and the key features of the special heterogeneous material

Hard x-ray broad band Laue lenses (80 - 600 keV): building methods and performances

We present the status of the laue project devoted to develop a technology for building a 20 meter long focal length Laue lens for hard x-/soft gamma-ray astronomy (80 - 600 keV). The Laue lens is composed of bent crystals of Gallium Arsenide (GaAs, 220) and Germanium (Ge, 111), and, for the first time, the focusing property of bent crystals has been exploited for this field of applications. We show the preliminary results concerning the adhesive employed to fix the crystal tiles over the lens support, the positioning accuracy obtained and possible further improvements. The Laue lens petal that will be completed in a few months has a pass band of 80 - 300 keV and is a fraction of an entire Laue lens capable of focusing X-rays up to 600 keV, possibly extendable down to 20 - 30 keV with suitable low absorption crystal materials and focal length. The final goal is to develop a focusing optics that can improve the sensitivity over current telescopes in this energy band by 2 orders of magnitude

A focal plane detector design for a wide-band Laue-lens telescope

The energy range above 60 keV is important for the study of many open problems in high energy astrophysics such as the role of Inverse Compton with respect to synchrotron or thermal processes in GRBs, non thermal mechanisms in SNR, the study of the high energy cut-offs in AGN spectra, and the detection of nuclear and annihilation lines. Recently the development of high energy Laue lenses with broad energy bandpasses from 60 to 600 keV have been proposed for a Hard X ray focusing Telescope (HAXTEL) in order to study the X-ray continuum of celestial sources. The required focal plane detector should have high detection efficiency over the entire operative range, a spatial resolution of about 1 mm, an energy resolution of a few keV at 500 keV and a sensitivity to linear polarization. We describe a possible configuration of the focal plane detector based on several CdTe/CZT pixelated layers stacked together to achieve the required detection efficiency at high energy. Each layer can operate both as a separate position sensitive detector and polarimeter or work with other layers to increase the overall photopeak efficiency. Each layer has a hexagonal shape in order to minimize the detector surface required to cover the lens field of view. The pixels would have the same geometry so as to provide the best coupling with the lens point spread function and to increase the symmetry for polarimetric studies.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figure

Multi-material 3D printed shape memory polymer with tunable melting and glass transition temperature activated by heat or light

Shape memory polymers are attractive smart materials that have many practical applications and academic interest. Three-dimensional (3D) printable shape memory polymers are of great importance for the fabrication of soft robotic devices due to their ability to build complex 3D structures with desired shapes. We present a 3D printable shape memory polymer, with controlled melting and transition temperature, composed of methacrylated polycaprolactone monomers and N-Vinylcaprolactam reactive diluent. Tuning the ratio between the monomers and the diluents resulted in changes in melting and transition temperatures by 20, and 6 °C, respectively. The effect of the diluent addition on the shape memory behavior and mechanical properties was studied, showing above 85% recovery ratio, and above 90% fixity, when the concentration of the diluent was up to 40 wt %. Finally, we demonstrated multi-material printing of a 3D structure that can be activated locally, at two different temperatures, by two different stimuli; direct heating and light irradiation. The remote light activation was enabled by utilizing a coating of Carbon Nano Tubes (CNTs) as an absorbing material, onto sections of the printed objects

Stress-Free Two-Way Shape Memory Effect of Poly(ethylene glycol)/ Poly(epsilon-caprolactone) Semicrystalline Networks

In this work, poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG)/poly(epsilon- caprolactone) (PCL) semicrystalline networks were prepared by photo-cross-linking of methacrylated macromonomers with different molecular weights and in different proportions to obtain amphiphilic materials capable of displaying properly designed shape memory effects. Networks based on PCL 10 kDa and PEG 3 kDa showed suitable thermal and mechanical properties with well-separated crystallization and melting regions to achieve a self-standing two-way shape memory effect. Particularly, after the application of a specific thermomechanical history, these materials are capable of cyclically changing their shape between two configurations upon cooling-heating cycles in the absence of any external load applied. The effect of the composition of the networks and of the employed thermomechanical parameters, such as the applied strain and the actuation temperature, was investigated to shed light on the shape memory mechanism for this class of materials, which are considered promising for applications in the biomedical field and as reversible actuators for soft robotics

A novel layered topology of auxetic materials based on the tetrachiral honeycomb microstructure

Microstructured honeycomb materials may exhibit exotic, extreme and tailorable mechanical properties, suited for innovative technological applications in a variety of modern engineering fields. The paper is focused on analysing the directional auxeticity of tetrachiral materials, through analytical, numerical and experimental methods. Theoretical predictions about the global elastic properties have been successfully validated by performing tensile laboratory tests on tetrachiral samples, realized with high precision 3D printing technologies. Inspired by the kinematic behaviour of the tetrachiral material, a newly-design bi-layered topology, referred to as bi-tetrachiral material, has been theoretically conceived and mechanically modelled. The novel topology virtuously exploits the mutual collaboration between two tetrachiral layers with opposite chiralities. The bi-tetrachiral material has been verified to outperform the tetrachiral material in terms of global Young modulus and, as major achievement, to exhibit a remarkable auxetic behaviour. Specifically, experimental results, confirmed by parametric analytical and computational analyses, have highlighted the effective possibility to attain strongly negative Poisson ratios, identified as a peculiar global elastic property of the novel bi-layered topology

Development status of the LAUE project

We present the status of LAUE, a project supported by the Italian Space Agency (ASI), and devoted to develop Laue lenses with long focal length (up to 100 meters), for hard X--/soft gamma--ray astronomy (80-600 keV). Thanks to their focusing capability, the design goal is to improve the sensitivity of the current instrumention in the above energy band by 2 orders of magnitude, down to a few times $10^{-8}$ photons/(cm$^2$ s keV).Comment: 9 pages, 9 figures, presented at the Space Telescopes and Instrumentation Symposium in Amsterdam, 2012: Ultraviolet to Gamma Ray Conference. Published in the Proceedings of the SPIE, Volume 8443, id. 84430B-84430B-9 (2012

Error-estimate-based adaptive integration for immersed isogeometric analysis

The Finite Cell Method (FCM) together with Isogeometric analysis (IGA) has been applied successfully in various problems in solid mechanics, in image-based analysis, fluid–structure interaction and in many other applications. A challenging aspect of the isogeometric finite cell method is the integration of cut cells. In particular in three-dimensional simulations the computational effort associated with integration can be the critical component of a simulation. A myriad of integration strategies has been proposed over the past years to ameliorate the difficulties associated with integration, but a general optimal integration framework that suits a broad class of engineering problems is not yet available. In this contribution we provide a thorough investigation of the accuracy and computational effort of the octree integration scheme. We quantify the contribution of the integration error using the theoretical basis provided by Strang's first lemma. Based on this study we propose an error-estimate-based adaptive integration procedure for immersed isogeometric analysis. Additionally, we present a detailed numerical investigation of the proposed optimal integration algorithm and its application to immersed isogeometric analysis using two- and three-dimensional linear elasticity problems

Topiramate in children and adolescents with epilepsy and mental retardation: a prospective study on behavior and cognitive effects.

The aim of the present study was to assess the behavioral and cognitive effects following treatment with topiramate in children and adolescents with epilepsy with mild to profound mental retardation. The study group comprised 29 children, 16 males and 13 females, aged 3 to 19 years, affected by partial (4) and generalized (25) crypto/symptomatic epilepsy and mental retardation (7 mild, 5 moderate, 15 severe, 2 profound), who were administered topiramate (TPM) as add-on therapy to their baseline antiepileptic treatment. At baseline, 3 months, 6 months, and 12 months, parents or caregivers of each patient were administered a questionnaire based on the Holmfrid Quality of Life Inventory. After a 3-month follow-up, the add-on topiramate caused overall mild to moderate cognitive/behavioral worsening in about 70% of children and adolescents with mental retardation and epilepsy. After 6 and 12 months of follow-up, global worsening persisted in 31 and 20.1% of cases, respectively. In conclusion, this trial confirms that TPM can have significant adverse cognitive and behavioral side effects, even in mentally disabled children and adolescents. 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Reversible Stress-Driven and Stress-Free Two-Way Shape Memory Effect in a Sol-Gel Crosslinked Polycaprolactone

The two-way shape memory effect is the ability of a material to change its shape between two configurations upon application and removal of a stimulus, and, among shape memory polymers, it is featured only by few systems, such as semicrystalline networks. When studied under tensile conditions, it consists of elongation-contraction cycles along cooling and heating across the crystallization and melting region, typically under the application of a constant load. However, recent studies on crosslinked semicrystalline co-polymers demonstrate that also a completely stress-free, or self-sustained, two-way effect may be achieved through specific thermomechanical cycles. This effect is currently regarded with interest for the development of intrinsically reversible sensors and actuators, and it may also be displayed by simpler materials, as homopolymer-based semicrystalline networks. Only seldom articles investigate this possibility, therefore in this work the two-way shape memory behavior is studied on a poly(e-caprolactone) system, crosslinked by means of a sol-gel approach. The effect is studied both under stress-driven and stress-free condition, by applying properly set-up thermo-mechanical histories. The results allow to describe the effect as a function of temperature, to reveal the dependence on specific testing parameters and to compare the extent of the reversible strain variation under these two conditions