During an internship at NASA Glenn, I was responsible for building an automated test rig for durability testing of SMA torque tubes. These tubes had cyclic thermal profile of +/- ~100° C in order to induce the full actuation, bias deflection, strain recovery cycle associated with nominal operation, and thus performing 100,000s of cycles took on the order of several weeks to months. Several thermocouples were welded to the SMAs, induction heaters were used to supply heat, and data was collected in Matlab.
Jack Schomer 