Researches Regarding the Effect of Nitinol Vibration Damper Applied to Infrastructures

Many of the performed researches all around the world aim to develop advanced technologies in order to enhance the performances of the in-frastructure systems, different from the actual ones, fact which involves multidisciplinary research (IT, sensoring, electronics, smart materials and others), aiming to assist engineers in realizing full benefits of struc-tural health monitoring. The paper presents a preliminary feasibility study of a system that can be used for damping of structural vibrations. Thus, shape memory alloys (SMA) components can affect through two mechanisms the structure's vibrations. The stresses from a SMA ele-ment that realize phase transformations, as a result of vibrations, have an effect on the frequency-amplitude characteristics. In addition, a dis-sipation of energy due to hysteresis in a SMA element can reduce the natural frequency and affect forced vibrations.