• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
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• v.34 no.3
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• pp.301-307
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• 2010

Actuation using a shape memory alloy (SMA) is considered to be an important technology that will play a leading role in market for next-generation medical devices because an SMA actuator can accurately imitate skillful and delicate hand movements. However, SMA actuators have not been successfully used because of problems in control design caused by the nonlinear hysteresis effect of SMA, which leads to inaccuracies in control systems. In order to overcome the effect, the authors invented a SMA actuator, which could actively and rapidly cool down and heat up, by combining a SMA catheter and a TE module using the Peltier effect. In order to evaluate the TE characteristics of our TE module system, the changes in the temperature with 1) incremental increases in a continuous electric current and 2) the appearance of a discontinuous constant or reverse current are discussed in this paper.

• Proceedings of the KSME Conference
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• 2008.11a
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• pp.1547-1552
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• 2008

The tip of these catheter with straight needles is not able to reach in the vicinity of the disc bulging, which are the cause of the low back pain and because the far indirect radio-frequency treatment results in the decompression, the nucleoplasty has the limit. Many incurable diseases has not been solved due to the unexistence of the advanced technique for the MIS human body catheter device. To increase the possibility of nucleoplasty, the needle tip should be located at the closest area of the lesion. For this reason, the best way to increase the success rate of the operation is that the needle tip should access 3-dimensionally to the operating field as soon as possible. To achieve this aim, our studies are restricted as follows: 1) the SMA catheter design to control the 3-dimensional direction, 2) the security of the immediate response by the positive control of the SMA element thermal distribution using Peltier thermoelectric elements, 3) the aquisition of the control data by monitoring the relationship between the temperature of SMA element and the displacement, and 4) the design of the controller to guarantee the accurate location.