Iron-based smart alloys for critical applications: a review on processing, properties, phase transformations, and current trends

On account of their unique shape memory effect (SME), pseudoelasticity, and biomedical applications, shape memory alloys (SMAs) have gained significant acceptance in the industrial trade and biomedical applications over the past few decades. Due to their affordable constituent parts and the availability of large-scale methods that are commonly employed for the manufacturing of stainless steels, Fe-based shape memory alloys offer benefits in commercial production, owing to their low cost compared to NiTi. The increasing insistence on stronger, lighter, and more functional materials paved the way for active materials. SMAs are a distinct grade of active materials. They exhibit attractive attributes like the potential to provide considerable recoverable strain while mechanical loading (superelasticity), shape recovery during heating (shape memory effect), and biocompatibility, which ultimately prove them to be one of the appropriate actuators for applications in the biomedical industry. This paper gives a review of the Martensitic transformation of some of the compositions of Fe-based SMAs, their potential to be used in civil structures as strengthening materials, their applications, and future research needs. This paper also focuses on the application of iron-based SMAs in different fields and the necessity to work on this SMA in the future since results show that Fe-based SMAs have shown good potential and can serve as an apt alternative to Ni-based shape memory alloys, which on the other hand has quite a lot of disadvantages, the key one being costly. Fe-based SMAs are comparatively lower in cost and have a greater scope to work with in the near future.