Fort Wayne Metals, Fort Wayne, Ind., announces that its engineers have developed a non-inclusion-based process for shape memory alloy fatigue durability enhancement. Specifically, a mechanical conditioning process is applied to 0.18 mm superelastic nitinol wire, with the result a 20% gain in high-cycle fatigue performance, and a 50% gain in and low-cycle fatigue performance.
Such post-processing techniques hold promise to improve medical device fatigue performance irrespective of specific nitinol inclusion distributions. Post-processing via this conditioning mode can be applied to wire diameters ranging from 20 microns through 1 mm in most binary alloys. Further, such methods are translatable to wire processing for performance and medical device durability.
This abstract is from a presentation at SMST 2018, the International Conference on Shape Memory and Superelastic Technologies, which took place in Ireland in May.
Conditioning of superelastic nitinol wire for improved fatigue resistance
Shane Mulcahy, Dave Plumley, Jeremy E. Schaffer, Fort Wayne Metals
