Since its serendipitous discovery, Nitinol has undergone a significant journey of innovation. Nitinol’s shape memory, superelasticity, and biocompatibility have made it the material of choice for applications ranging from medical devices to aerospace. However, complex manufacturability and traditional processing challenges have often limited its design freedom and widespread adoption. While 3D printing, particularly Laser Powder Bed Fusion, offers unprecedented geometric freedom, additively processed Nitinol often exhibits lower compliance and recoverable strains than industrially processed wires. Consequently, new design paradigms are required to augment Nitinols deformation capabilities while preserving its unique properties.

This thesis explores the intersection of smart materials, additive manufacturing, metamaterials, and computational design to develop Nitinol actuators with enhanced performance. The research establishes an algorithmic methodology for creating junction-less textile-based architectures that decouple global response from local bending, effectively suppressing stress concentrations. By modulating braided architectures, it is demonstrated that these structures can precisely transition from compliant to stiff responses, enabling metallic architectures to exhibit elastomeric-like behavior.

Building on these foundations, a new approach to designing vascular implants is proposed, establishing the framework for patient-specific minimally invasive medical devices. By combining braided architectures and fiber control with 3D-printed Nitinol, it is possible to overcome the lower compliance of printed alloys to withstand extreme deformations while maintaining critical radial strength, enabling previously unattainable device architectures.

Moving further, the “Soft Metals Matter” paradigm is formalized through the development of “Braided Architected Materials” (BAMs). By extending braiding principles to create jammed networks of interlocked fibers, this research achieves a paradoxical response: metal metamaterials that exhibit elastomeric-like behaviorextreme deformability and compliancewhile retaining high metallic strength. These BAMs function as phase-selective architectures where topological locking, driven by inter-fiber jamming and localized microfractures, enables a transition from a spring-like state to a saturated energy-absorbing sink.

Finally, a microphysiological system simulating cardiovascular flow was developed to evaluate the biological performance of Nitinol structures under realistic conditions.

Generally, this research culminates in a dual-pronged breakthrough: a transformative manufacturing methodology for personalized vascular implants and the formalization of the “Soft Metals Matter” paradigm, redefining metals as a medium for high-performance, adaptive engineering.