In an effort to promote the evaluation and comparison of actuation forms, the CASMART Design Working Group initiated a student design challenge in 2015. The challenge focused on developing and using SMA actuator design tools to facilitate solutions to three proposed problems: a deployable solar array, an automotive vent, and jet engine thermal management.
Six teams of graduate and undergraduate students from Colorado School of Mines, Texas A&M, and University of North Texas competed in the design challenge. The CASMART Design Working group provided details on the three potential applications and subject matter experts to act as mentors to the teams. The teams chose an application and went through a design, build, and test cycle. They worked with their mentors to research, develop, and use a design tool specific to the actuation element form they chose. The SMA element forms they considered included tubes (rotary), wire (linear), helical coil (linear), and plate (bending).
Five teams completed the challenge by demonstrating their hardware solutions at a special session at Smart Materials, Adaptive Structures, and Intelligent Systems Conference (SMASIS) 2015 in Colorado Springs. The design freedom enabled by considering a variety of SMA element forms led directly to creative solutions offered by the teams. For example, Team Casmartians from Texas A&M designed a highly integrated deployable solar array actuation system using SMA tubes that provide rotary actuation. Team Hatch-It from Colorado School of Mines designed a clever pulley system with SMA springs to control the active hatch vent of a Corvette.
The Design Challenge provided some key feedback to CASMART. The opportunity to participate in a challenge with industry and professional researcher mentoring was both engaging and valuable for the students. The ability to compare SMA element forms early in the design process is extremely difficult without comparable first order models that enable scoping studies. Additional work is needed to make simple-to-use design tools available to the SMA designer. Finally, the difficulty and value of building real hardware to validate your concept, modeling, and design cannot be underestimated. CASMART suggests that regular Design Challenges of this sort, perhaps hosted at SMST conferences, could greatly benefit the field by stoking interest and expanding access to creative design solutions.
Initiated by Boeing, NASA Glenn, NASA Langley and Texas A&M University in 2006, CASMART was set up to coordinate resources to enable the design of revolutionary applications based on SMA technology. Now comprised of over a dozen organizations, CASMART members seek to advance the state of the art for Shape Memory Alloy (SMA) technology through a synergy of academic, industry, and government expertise.
