Artificial intelligence automates the characterization of reversibly actuating planar-flow-casted NiTi shape memory alloy foil

Nickel-Titanium (NiTi) shape memory alloys (SMAs) are smart materials able to recover their original shape under thermal stimulus. Near-net-shape NiTi SMA foils of 2 meters in length and width of 30 mm have been successfully produced by a planar flow casting facility at CSIRO, opening possibilities of wider applications of SMA foils. The study also focuses on establishing a fully automated experimental system for the characterisation of their reversible actuation, significantly improving SMA foils adaptation into real applications. Artificial Intelligence involving Computer Vision and Machine Learning based methods were successfully employed in the development of the automation SMA characterization process. The study finds that an Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) Regression model based predictive system experimented with over 175,000 video samples could achieve 99% overall prediction accuracy. Generalisation capability of the proposed system makes a significant contribution towards the efficient optimisation of the material design to produce high quality 30 mm SMA foils.