RESEARCH PAPER Modelling and simulation of the behavior of a shape memory membrane for programmable matter 4D prototyping Mohamed Ennaji 1 | Souad Tayane 1 | Jaafar Gaber 2 1 Structural Engineering,Intelligent Systems and Electrical Energy Laboratory, ENSAM, Hassan II University of Casablanca, Casablanca, Morocco 2 FEMTO‐ST Institute, UTBM, Univ. Bourgogne Franche‐Comté, CNRS, Belfort, France Correspondence Souad Tayane, Laboratory of Complex Systems Engineering, ENSAM, Hassan II University of Casablanca, Morocco. Email: souadtayane2013@gmail.com Abstract In almost all areas of the industry and more generally in the sector of develop- ment of manufacturing products, the realization of the product passes through several successive stages going from the design to the realization of the prod- uct. The most critical phase is prototyping because it is at this point that usu- ally the most important decisions are made. In several sectors this step is very expensive, and in any case, the prototype undergoes several modifications and requires several validations before it is definitive for the transition to production. The prototype must generally consti- tute a model of the product that has all or part of the technical qualities and operating characteristics that must appear in the final product, to demonstrate or affirm the validity of the concept and thus its final validation, which increases the overall cost of the prototyping phase. In the vast majority of prototyping devices available for the moment, be it by additive or subtractive process, the realization of the prototype requires a lot of time, and once the prototype is made, it can only be modified by destructive techniques because the materials used are frozen and do not allow easy reuse. This study proposes a device for the prototyping of product, allowing a modifi- cation of the geometry of the prototype by means of a deformable composite membrane with shape memory, reusable and programmable. The device in question consists of a flexible composite membrane whose matrix is a flexible polymer, and the reinforcement is a shape‐memory alloy fibre and rubber effect, having a given electrical resistance. These shape memory fibres are woven in such a way as to ensure deformations in the direction normal to the plane of the membrane by injecting the current into each fibre. This is ensured by a cross weave allowing the control of the direction of the overall deformation through the deformation specific to each fibre. In this research work, we present the results of the modelling and simulation of the behaviour of a composite membrane with shape memory. KEYWORDS 4D prototyping, composite membrane, modelling and simulation, programmable matter, shape memory alloys DOI: 10.1002/sres.2650 Syst Res Behav Sci. 2019;1–10. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/sres 1