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The specific material properties of shape memory alloys are due to the formation of martensitic microstructures. In this contribution, we develop a strategy to model the material behavior based on energy considerations: we first present narrow bounds to the elastic energy obtained by lamination of the multi-well problem in the monocrystalline case. These considerations are then extended to polycrystals and compared to a convexification bound. Due to the acceptably low difference between convexification lower and lamination upper bound,we use the convexification bound to establish a micromechanical model which, on the basis of physically well motivated parameters such as elastic constants and transformation strains, is able to represent a variety of aspects of the material behavior such as seudoelasticity, pseudoplasticity and martensite reorientation. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.