Multifunctional materials can act as machines for sensing, actuation, morphing, damage mitigation and limiting detrimental structural loads. Industrial applications range from biomedical, aerospace, civil and automotive. Shape memory alloys are a class of multifunctional materials that undergo large shape changes, and upon heating or removing external stimuli “remember” their original shape and form. Underlying solid-state atomic and microstructure length scale phase transitions are reversible, which begets the bulk scale memory and thus smartly designing the microstructure can tailor alloy behavior. In this talk, I will discuss our work using macro and micro-scale additive manufacturing and efforts to establish the interrelationships between novel fabrication technologies and shape memory functionality.
