Iron-based superelastic alloys with near-constant critical stress temperature dependence

Temperature-stable superelasticity Shape memory alloys are superelastic, which means that they can recover their original shape after a large amount of strain. However, in most alloys, this behavior tends to only work well for a small range of temperatures. Xia et al. identified an iron-manganese-aluminum-chromium-nickel alloy for which superelasticity is virtually temperature independent (see the Perspective by La Roca and Sade). This distinctive property is attractive for a variety of applications in which large temperature variations are normal, such as in space exploration. Science , this issue p. 855 ; see also p. 773