Home > Facilities
The Mechanics of Materials and Structures research group has a large number of facilities for research on impact, fatigue, NDT&E,... Again, a full description can be found in the research report. Here only a list of the available facilities is listed, split up in two categories: (i) experimental facilities, and (ii) numerical facilities:
- Experimental facilities
- Impact
- bird strike set-up for real birds and gelatine replicas
- split Hopkinson tensile bar set-up
- pneumatic launcher
- two drop weight towers (3 m and 12 m)
- pendulum impact test rig for glass windows
- lab-scale set-up for slamming wave impact
- digital high speed camera (up to 250,000 fps)
- three oscilloscopes (up to 100 MHz sampling rate)
- Fatigue
- two servohydraulic machines
- accessoiries for tension-compression and pure shear testing
- devices for 3- and 4-point bending
- two extensometers
- electrical resistance measurement
- NDT/NDE
- optical fibre sensors
- ultrasound phased array (64 probes)
- shadow and projection moire
- ultrasound scanning facility for C-scans and polar scans
- Schlieren set-up for acousto-optics research
- General mechanics of composite materials
- electromechanical testing machine
- hand lay-up and vacuum assisted resin transfer moulding
- infrared welding set-up
- autoclave
- filament winding machine
- artificial turf testing set-up
- fibre volume content of carbon and glass fibre composites
- Impact
- Numerical facilities
- implicit and explicit finite element suite ABAQUS v6.10
- explicit finite element code LS-Dyna
- HyperMesh high-performance finite-element pre-processor
- five workstations for intensive calculations
- Parallel computing infrastructure for finite element calculations (2000+ cores, 3.2 Terabyte RAM)
- numerical software (Mathcad, Matlab, Maple)
- CAE software (SolidWorks)
- data acquisition software (LabVIEW)