An analytical study on the instability phenomena during the phase transitions in a thin strip under uniaxial tension

摘要

In the experiments on stress-induced phase transitions in SMA strips, several interesting instability phenomena have been observed, including a necking-type instability (associated with the stress drop), a shear-type instability (associated with the inclination of the transformation front) and an orientation instability (associated with the switch of the inclination angle). In order to shed more lights on these phenomena, in this paper we conduct an analytical study. We consider the problem in a three-dimensional setting, which implies that one needs to study the difficult problem of solution bifurcations of high-dimensional nonlinear partial differential equations. By using the smallness of the maximum strain, the thickness and width of the strip, we use a methodology, which combines series expansions and asymptotic expansions, to derive the asymptotic normal form equations, which can yield the leading-order behavior of the original three-dimensional field equations. An important feature of the second normal form equation is that it contains a turning point for the localization (necking) solution of the first equation. It is the presence of such a turning point which causes the inclination of the phase transformation front. The WKB method is used to construct the asymptotic solutions, which can capture the shear instability and the orientation instability successfully. Our analytical results reveal that the inclination of the transformation front is a phenomenon of localization-induced buckling (or phase-transition-induced buckling as the localization is caused by the phase transition). Due to the similarities between the development of the Luders band in a mild steel and the stress-induced transformations in a SMA, the present results give a strong analytical evidence that the former is also caused by macroscopic effects instead of microscopic effects. Our analytical results also reveal more explicitly the important roles played by the geometrical parameters.