Abstract: In this paper, an in situ metallographic video system was used to study the morphology in Cu-Zn-Al shape memory alloy (SMA) during thermal cycling phase tmnsforma-tion. There are seven different types of martensite morphology in Cu-Zn-Al SMA,i.e. plate, spean bamboo, noose, round-spot, line and dot-like martensites. During transformation and inverse-transformation, the thermoelastic martensites were rising and falling, growing and shrinking, splitting and merping. The growth patterns of thermoelastic martensite were divided into three types: fast growing, very slow ex-pansion and uniform automatic growth. Automatic growth appeared when ageing at a temperature below Ms. The result, for the first time, coofirmed Olson and Cohen,s suggestion that thermoelastic martensite may be automatically grown when ageing be-low Ms. With increasing numbers of thermal cycling, both the memory recovery ratio (% )and memory recoverp degradation (%) degraded logarithmically. The degrada-tion was steep in the initial stage and then became more and more gradual in the middle and the final stages caused by the stabilisation of martensite. In the initial stage, vacancies assumed the controlling role, while dislocations took the major role in other stages. The martensite transformation caused the intedeces to become bent and blurmd, but with increasing cycling numbers, the movements of interface had the same degradation effects as the memory recovery ratio curves. Under these conditions, we also found the martensites on one side of the intedece became reorientated and par-allel to the intedece. It was therefore concluded that the movement degradation of the interface and the appearance of bamboo like martensite induced the degradation of two way shape memory effect (TWMP).

Key words: in situ metallographic video study, thermal cycling, phase trans-formation, the degradation of TWME