Journal of Material Sciences & Engineering

Smart materials are materials that have intrinsic sensing, controlling, actuation or information processing capabilities in their microstructures. These materials are used to create smart systems containing multifunctional parts that can perform sensing, control, and actuation. Smart systems often exhibit high functionality such as self-diagnosis and self-restoration. Smart materials are being developed for applications in numerous manufacturing sectors such as in the aerospace industry, biomedical industry, and general manufacturing industries. This review paper covers some of the recent advances in the area of smart materials and the enhanced functional capabilities these materials provide for a range of smart applications.

Huge amounts of unusable portion of leather and cattle hair from leather industries and chicken feather from poultries are polluting the environmental atmosphere tremendously. To reduce environmental pollution, these discarded parts need to use to produce other products. In this research, cow hair, chicken feather and waste leather were used to prepare useful composites combining with unsaturated polyester resin (UPR) to consider their reinforcement property and chemical property with view to curtail the environmental pollution. One portion of washed fibers was treated with aqueous solution of sodium hydroxide and the left portion was untreated. Then the chemically treated and untreated both portions of fibers were used to unsaturated polyester resin at 2, 5, 7, 10, 12 and 15 wt% fiber loading respectively. The composites were produced by hand lay-up technique and prepared composites were characterized by tensile and bending properties, Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and Thermo Gravimetric Analysis. Obtained all the results revealed best outcomes and significant enhancement in the properties of the composites with the optimum combination by 5 wt% treated cow hair fiber.

Today, polymer composites are almost used in all areas of life. Their light weight, strength, low price and fast processing properties open new ways to their use. In this study, design and structural analysis of a short glass fiber reinforced polyamide involving drastic loadings and functioning environments is presented for a washing machine drum support. The results show that at least 50% short glass fiber reinforcement is needed for a successful material conversion from an Aluminum alloy.

A series of alloy systems take place in class of advanced smart materials with adaptive properties and stimulus response to the external changes. Shape memory alloys take place in this group, due to the shape reversibility and capacity of responding to changes in the environment. These alloys exhibit a peculiar property called shape memory effect, which is characterized by the recoverability of two certain shapes of material at different temperatures. These alloys have dual characteristics called thermoelectricity and super elasticity, from viewpoint of memory behavior. Two successive structural transformations, thermal and stress induced martensitic transformations govern shape memory phenomena in crystallographic basis. Thermal induced martensite occurs along with crystal twinning in self-accommodating manner on cooling and ordered parent phase structures turn into twinned martensite structures, and twinned structures turn into the detwinned structures by stressing material in low temperature condition by means of stress.