For our senior capstone project, my team and I were tasked by TE Connectivity to create a novel and innovative actuator to replace the traditional electromechanical actuators commonly found in relays. Over the course of eight months, we identified nine potential options and narrowed them through rigorous testing and research to deliver a developed prototype actuator to TE. The final prototype utilized shape memory alloy coils to create an actuator with 20% of the mass of a traditional electromagnetic coil of similar specifications. We recieved a patent for the actuator design which can be seen below.
As a member of the team, I was in charge of testing components and systems to ensure that they met the requirements that TE had laid out for us. I created robust testing protocols and rigs to test shape memory coils to determine the maximum force they could exert in a single cycle as well as how that maximum force may degrade over the lifetime of the actuator. This testing was essential to aspects of the actuator design, such as the number of coils required to meet the force and lifetime requirements.