The Development of a Nitinol Angular Actuator

Shape memory alloys are the key to sustainable technology and future industries. One of the most highlighted alloys around these times is Nitinol. It has special properties to work in extreme conditions and it can be specially projected for specific tasks. The Nickel-Titanium alloy is tested by NASA to build a new type of wheel to be used for future rovers which will be send to Mars. Other recently known devices to be built using this material are stents, root canal files, arches, bone implants used in medicine, aerospace gas turbines engines, thermal bimorph od dynamic actuators used in engineering, innovative SC brace or seismic retrofit applications in seismology and the list can continue. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the ungular actuator that has as a main component a Nitinol spring. In the theoretical part we identified the newest solutions in the sphere of Nitinol devices and presented them though the perspective of bibliometric maps obtained with the software VOSviewer. We focused on articles which analyze and improve the NiTi alloy in order to create a wider applicability range for it, studies over the already existing devices, testing models, novel applications and devices which utilize it and papers identifying new applications for actual NiTi devices/ equipment. Conclusions on the subject are that the industry is more and more interested in the shape memory materials and are open to investing in the research of the Nitinol. The presented device was physically developed and tested at the University Ștefan cel Mare of Suceava. Some results on the testing of the device are presented and discussed in this paper.