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Differential Scanning Calorimetric, DSC, runs taken during martensitic phase transformations in shape memory alloys, often look differently during cooling and heating. Similar asymmetry is observed e.g. for the numbers of hits or the critical exponents of energy and amplitude distributions ( and , respectively) in acoustic emission measurements. It is illustrated that, in accordance with empirical correlations, the above asymmetry of acoustic noises can be classified into two groups: the relative changes of the exponents during cooling and heating (  =( h - c )/ c as well as   =( h - c )/ c )) are either positive or negative. For positive  values the number of hits and the total energy of acoustic emission are larger for cooling, and the situation is just the reverse for negative asymmetry. Our interpretation is based on the different ways of relaxation of the elastic strain energy during cooling as well as heating. It is illustrated that if the relaxed fraction of the total elastic strain energy (which would be stored without relaxations) during cooling is larger than the corresponding relaxed fraction during heating, then the asymmetry is positive. Magnetic emission noises, accompanied with martensitic phase transformations in ferromagnetic alloys, show similar asymmetry than those observed for thermal (DSC) and acoustic noises and depends on the constant external magnetic field too.

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Structural changes (martensitic transformation, rearrangements of martensitic variants) in shape memory alloys have an intermittent character that is accompanied by the emission of different (thermal, acoustic, and magnetic) noises, which are fingerprints of the driven criticality, resulting in a damped power-law behaviour. We will illustrate what kinds of important information can be obtained on the structural changes in shape memory alloys. It was established that the power exponents of distributions of acoustic emission (AE) parameters (energy, amplitude, etc.), belonging to martensitic transformations, show quite a universal character and depend only on the symmetry of the martensite. However, we have shown that the asymmetry of the transformation (the exponents are different for the forward and reverse transformations) results in as large differences as those due to the martensite symmetry. We will also demonstrate how the recently introduced AE clustering method can help to identify the different contributions responsible for the asymmetry. The usefulness of the investigations of time correlations between the subsequent events and correlations between acoustic and magnetic noise events in ferromagnetic shape memory alloys will be demonstrated too. Finally, examples of acoustic and magnetic emissions during variant rearrangements (superplastic or superelastic behaviour) in the martensitic state will be described.