Prescribed performance model-free adaptive sliding mode control of a shape memory alloy actuated system

This paper concentrates on a simple and robust control method for the discrete time nonlinear systems to fulfill the requirement of predefined accuracy. A sliding mode control method is designed by introducing equivalent dynamic linearization technique according to the input/output (I/O) information merely. A square-root type error transformation method is presented for the tracking error to be restricted within a preassigned zone. The performance of presented control method is demonstrated through experiments on a nonlinear system. Experiment results show that the presented control method has a superior tracking accuracy compared with PID controller and model-free adaptive control (MFAC).

Numerical study of patient-specific ankle-foot orthoses for drop foot patients using shape memory alloy

Drop foot is a nerve-muscle disorder that affects the muscles that lift the foot. The two main side effects of drop foot are slapping/kicking the foot after heel strike (foot) and dragging the foot during the swing (toe drag). Treatment methods such as ankle-foot orthoses (AFO) have some biomechanical benefits, but are not applicable to all walking conditions and cannot mitigate significant gait complications. This study introduces the design of a passive AFO system, which combines an ordinary AFO and a shape memory alloy (SMA) element. OpenSim was used to simulate patients with muscle weakness and to calculate the torque needed to imitate normal ankle joint stiffness. The calculated torque was then reproduced for different levels of muscle weakness by the superelasticity of SMAs. The study showed that the normal joint stiffness profile for each patient with a certain level of muscle weakness can be restored by designing a patient-specific orthosis.

A Shape Memory Alloy-Based Miniaturized Actuator for Catheter Interventions

In the current scenario of endovascular intervention, surgeons have to manually navigate the catheter within the complex vasculature of the human body under the guidance of X-ray. This manual intervention upsurges the possibilities of vessel damage due to frequent contact between the catheter and vasculature wall. In this context, a shape memory alloy-based miniaturized actuator was proposed in this study with a specific aim to reduce vessel wall related damage by improving the bending motions of the guidewire tip in a semi-automatic fashion. The miniaturized actuator was integrated with a FDA-approved guidewire and tested within a patient-specific vascular network model to realize its feasibility in the real surgical environment. The results illustrate that the miniaturized actuator gives a bending angle over 23° and lateral displacement over 900 µm to the guide wire tip by which the guidewire can be navigated with precision and possible vessel damage during the catheter intervention can certainly be minimized. In addition to it, the dynamic responses of the presented actuator were further investigated through numerical simulation in conjunction with the analytic analysis.

Study on loss mechanism of SMA tracheal stent subjected to cough excitation

A kind of Ti-Ni shape memory alloy (SMA) hysteretic nonlinear model is developed, and the loss mechanism of a SMA tracheal stent subjected to cough excitation is studied in this paper. Nonlinear differential items are introduced to express the hysteretic phenomena of Ti-Ni SMA, and the fitting effect of the SMA constitutive model on the experimental data is proved by the partial least-square regression method. The nonlinear dynamic model of a Ti-Ni SMA tracheal stent subjected to cough excitation is developed, and the system's dynamic response is obtained. The numerical results show that the system's vibration is little in weak excitation, becomes large with the increase of the stochastic excitation, and finally becomes little again with the further increase of the stochastic excitation; the stochastic resonance phenomenon occurs in the process, which may cause stent fracture or loss.

Effect of laser treatment on the attachment and viability of mesenchymal stem cell responses on shape memory NiTi alloy

The objectives of this study were to investigate the effect of laser-induced surface features on the morphology, attachment and viability of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) at different periods of time, and to evaluate the biocompatibility of different zones: laser-melted zone (MZ), heat-affected zone (HAZ) and base metal (BM) in laser-treated NiTi alloy. The surface morphology and composition were studied by scanning electron microscope (SEM) and X-ray photoemission spectroscopy (XPS), respectively. The cell morphology was examined by SEM while the cell counting and viability measurements were done by hemocytometer and 3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide (MTT) colorimetric assay. The results indicated that the laser-induced surface features, such as surface roughening, presence of anisotropic dendritic pattern and complete surface Ni oxidation were beneficial to improve the biocompatibility of NiTi as evidenced by the highest cell attachment (4 days of culture) and viability (7 days of culture) found in the MZ. The biocompatibility of the MZ was the best, followed by the BM with the HAZ being the worst. The defective and porous oxide layer as well as the coarse grained structure might attribute to the inferior cell attachment (4 days of culture) and viability (7 days of culture) on the HAZ compared with the BM which has similar surface morphology.

Nonlinear dynamic characteristics of SMA intravascular stent under radial stochastic loads

Nonlinear dynamic characteristics of shape memory alloy (SMA) intravascular stent under radial stochastic loads were studied in this paper. Von de Pol item was improved to interpret the hysteretic phenomena of SMA, and the nonlinear dynamic model of SMA intravascular stent under radial stochastic loads was developed. The conditions of stochastic stability of the system were obtained in singular boundary theory. The steady-state probability density function of the dynamic response of the system was given, and the stochastic Hopf bifurcation characteristics of the system were analyzed. Theoretical analysis and numerical simulation show that the stability of the trivial solution varies with bifurcation parameters, and stochastic Hopf bifurcation appears in the process, which can cause stent fracture or loss. The results of this paper are helpful to application of SMA intravascular stent in biomedical engineering fields.