Abstract

One of the main fields of shape memory alloy application in civil engineering is oriented on mitigation of earthquake effects on structures. Vibration isolators that incorporate elements made of SMA take advantage of its characteristic phenomenon of nonlinear hysteretic response, also known as superelasticity. In this work, authors presents an approach to phenomenological modelling of SMA by using rheological schemes. One of the advantages of this approach is a possibility of formulation of constitutive relationships as a set of explicit differential equations. As an illustration of validity of the formulation, authors present the response of single degree of freedom oscillator that incorporates SMA elements modelled by different existing SMA models. The response obtained based on the model that uses rheological schemes is compared with Lagoudas thermodynamic constitutive SMA model and simplified material model. All of the compered models are found to match well and show important reduction in displacement transmissibility.