Solution behavior of the transient heat transfer problem in thermoelectric shape memory alloy actuators

The main purpose of this paper is to study the solution behavior of the transient heat transfer problem for one-dimensional symmetric thermoelectric shape memory alloy (SMA) actuators. It is proved that for the transient cooling problem with constant electric current density of magnitude $|J|$ there is a value $J_0$ of $|J|$ such that when $|J| J_0$, the temperature in SMA may not be always decreasing, which is an important property of thermoelectric SMA actuators reported by Lagoudas and Ding [Internat. J. Engrg. Sci., 33 (1995), pp. 2345--2364]. A lower bound of $J_0$ is given. The physical implications of main results are also discussed.