An experimental investigation on the energy storage in a shape-memory-polymer system

In this paper, the effect of thermomechanical loading on the behavior of deflection-based harvested energies from a shape memory polymer system is experimentally investigated. Samples are created with honeycomb cells from poly-lactic acid using additive manufacturing techniques. The shape memory effect in shape recovery and force recovery paths are studied under thermomechanical tests in bending and tensile modes. The maximum recoverable strain energy is computed as well. According to the conducted thermomechanical tests, it is shown that the thermal expansion coefficient is much more dominant in the tensile mode. Some procedures are proposed to reduce the thermal expansion effect on the force recovery and arrive at higher energy harvested from a shape memory system.