2.1.

SMA investigations for design of heat engine :

A comprehensive DSC analysis was performed on different SMA wires to understand the thermal
deformation cycle and identify the composition which has maximum thermodynamic efficiency at
low temperatures under stress free condition. Supplementary Fig. S4(a)-(e) show the hysteresis
across phase change and the transition temperature for each sample. Using this experimental heat
flow diagram, the critical temperatures – Ms (martensite start), Mf (martensite finish), As (austenite
start), and Af (austenite finish) – for forward and reverse transformation were quantified. It can be
seen from Fig. S4 that wire 5 has the lowest forward transition temperature of 48 °C, which is most
suitable for our heat engine. The difference between thermal energy goingin and coming-out of the
wires was found to be very small, which should be the case since the DSC tests were run under no
stress condition (no work). Residual heat accumulation may cause thermo-mechanical fatigue in the
system. Fig. S5(a), (b) and (c) show detailed results on phase transition of the annealed sample.
Thermal annealing results in shift of transition temperature from 48 °C to 54 °C. SMA wire was also
characterized using dynamic mechanical analyzer (DMA) in order to determine the force dynamics
and viscoelasticity properties. Detailed comparative study of damping and storage modulus values
for as-received and annealed SMA samples are shown in Supplementary Fig. S6-8. We observed that
with the increase of frequency the damping coefficient decreases, and with the increase of
temperature scan rate the transition temperature of the wire increases.