Simulation of adaptive structures made of textile and shape memory alloy.

Medical textiles are widely used as bandages for diverse purposes. Usually textiles have a certain stiffness depending on the passive material and the manufacturing technique. To improve and extend the applications by making the stressstrain characteristic adaptive, hybrid structures made of textile with integrated shape memory alloys (SMA) are investigated and evaluated regarding its capability. This article focuses the benefits given by the numerical simulation of smart textiles using the finite element method (FEM).