Smart materials
The term ‘Smart Materials’ is somewhat subjective and has different connotations for different people. If we were to define ‘Smart Materials’, we would say that any material which is nonlinear and hysteretic is a smart material. Let’s explain this simply using an example. It is like completing a round trip journey. During the outbound, a person travels from point A to point B along a certain path and during the return, travels along a different path back to the point A. A similar situation can be thought for a material which goes from a certain material state A to B along one path, but returns to A along a different path. In this sense, the material is smart’ as opposed to other materials which are constrained to travel along a straight line and hence cannot display any smartness (traveling along different paths but managing to come back to the starting point).
In any case, there are many materials which come under the broad classification of smart materials: shape memory alloys (SMA), shape memory polymers (SMP), piezoelectric materials, ferroelectric materials, magnetostrictive materials , polymeric gels and so on. Our research deals primarily with SMAs and, to some extent, SMPs.