“…In this case, the SMA wires need to be pre-strained in order to undergo the shape-memory effect upon heating: the wire will try to recover its initial, unstrained shape, or, if kinematically constrained, will generate high stresses which can be used for actuation. A computationally efficient, thermomechanical SMA model has been developed in a parallel research [4] and can be exploited to analyse the response of SMA actuators: the algorithm's one-dimensional simplification enables to simulate systems including SMA wires, which can also be embedded into a host material or fixed to a host structure. A User-Material subroutine (UMAT) has been implemented for the finite-element code ABAQUS.…”