On the Three Phase Mixtures in Martensitic Transformations of Shape Memory Alloys: Thermodynamical Modeling and Characteristic Temperatures

We study here the thermally-induced martensitic transformation process of shape memory alloys. Taking the internal energy of phase mixtures as the potential function and introducing coherency energies between martensite and austenite and between different variants of the martensitic phase, we are able to use thermodynamical arguments to obtain hysteresis diagrams which could be measured experimentally. The characteristic temperatures for martensitic transformation, (martensite start and finish) and (austenite start and finish) can be identified explicitly and are closely related to the coherency parameters of the coherency energies. Received September 12, 1997