J0405-3-4 Light Weight Actuator Structure with SMA Honeycomb Core for Shape Control

Abstract

We have developed a lightweight actuator beam with sufficient stiffness by bonding CFRP skins to an SMA honeycomb core with pre-shear strain and fixing both ends of the skins. When the beam was heated, the SMA honeycomb generated the recovery shear force and applied the force to the CFRP skins uniformly. Accordingly, this actuator beam was able to bend in the out-of-plane direction and generate bending force. In this research, in order to increase the actuation performance we investigated the relation of the pre-shear strain and the honeycomb shape to the bending deformation and force of the beam. As a result, when the larger pre-shear deformation was applied to the honeycomb, bending deformation and force were increased. Also, when the honeycomb shape was changed by addition of longitudinal SMA foils to decrease the cell size, the actuation performance was increased.