Bending of Superelastic Wires, Part II: Application to Three-Point Bending

The constitutive relationship between applied pure bending moment and the resulting curvature of a few superelastic alloy wires is applied to the three-point bending problem. Three-point bending experiments on hard and soft loading machines are described. The relationship between the applied deflection and the resulting force in three-point bending is calculated from a nonlinear Euler-Bernoulli rod theory. A numerical procedure used to solve the three-point bending problem for both loading and unloading is briefly described and numerical results are compared with experiment.