An overview of nitinol medical applications

Superelastic nitinol is now a common and well-known engineering material in the medical industry. While the greater flexibility of the alloy drives many of the applications, there are actually a large number of lesser-known advantages of nitinol in medical devices. This paper reviews 10 of these less-obvious, but very important, reasons for nitinol’s success, both past and future. Several new medical applications will be used to exemplify these points, including the quickly growing and technologically demanding stent applications. Stents are particularly interesting in that they involve new and complex manufacturing techniques, present a demanding and interesting fatigue environment, and most interestingly, take advantage of the thermoelastic hysteresis of nitinol.