Smart Materials are designed materials that have one or more properties that can be significantly changed in a controlled fashion by an externally applied field value such as stress, temperature and electric or magnetic fields. This behavior is reversible and consequently enables these materials to fulfill actuation and sensing functions in one component. Compared to conventional systems such actuators are rather high integrated. They can be applied not just to be a discrete part of the system; they are the system itself combining sensing, actuation and mechanical functions. Certain actuating properties of Smart Materials are far beyond the ones of conventional actuating principles. These advantages possess to use them in special application areas such as lightweight construction, active vibration control or the development of highly dynamic systems for instance. The design of Smart Materials in highly integrated components is technically more advanced and requires interdisciplinary knowledge. In this paper we present three groups of Smart Materials: piezoceramics, shape memory alloys and dielectric elastomers and their specific characteristics. That covers their physical working principle, their mechanical behavior, the actuation and sensing properties. Especially the interdisciplinary design approach required for developing highly integrated components is exemplarily clarified on Shape Memory Alloys. To enable designers to use Smart Materials without having this special knowledge smart tools for smart design are presented.
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