Yuval Freed's blog

With the increasing use of shape memory alloys in recent years, it is important to investigate the effect of cracks. Theoretically, the stress field near the crack tip is unbounded. Hence, a stress-induced transformation occurs, and the martensite phase is expected to appear in the neighborhood of the crack tip, from the very first loading step. In that case, the crack tip region is not governed by the far field stress, but rather by the crack tip stress field. This behavior implies transformation toughening or softening.

Smart materials have received much attention in recent years, especially due to their various applications in smart structures, medical devices, actuators, space and aeronautics. Among these
materials, shape memory alloys exhibit extremely large, inelastic, recoverable strains (of the order of 10%), resulting from transformation between austenitic and martensitic phases. This
transformation may be induced by a change, either in the applied stress, the temperature, or both.