This facility provides material testing capabilities in compression, tension, torsion, torsion/compression and torsion/tension at strain rates of the order of 102 to 104 s-1. These bars have diameters of 0.5 in., 0.75 in., and 1 in. Experiments with load pulses of up to 600 µs can be conducted. Soft recovery of specimens is possible, allowing postmortem microscopic analyses of specimens after well-defined load pulses. This facility is equipped with four Polytec OFV-3001 laser vibrometers each with an OFV-512 optical fiber laser head for measurement of surface velocities between 0 to 10 ms-1. Experiments concerning constitutive behavior, shear banding, dynamic fracture toughness, impact damage and response of composites, and electro-mechanical response of piezoceramics can be conducted using this facility. A set of Tektronix high-speed digital oscilloscopes are available for data acquisition at sampling rates up to 50 nanoseconds per point. An IMACON high-speed digital camera (16 frames at 200×106 f/s) is also available for high-resolution digital image acquisition.
POC: Min Zhou
