The Material Performance Lab enables the study of the endurance of engineering materials. The emphasis is currently focused on the study of manufacturing-process influences on fatigue and fracture and the inclusion of these influences in the design process. To this end, the lab is equipped with the following:

• Mechanical Testing
  • Three servo-hydraulic material testing machines. These machines use state of the art digital control hardware and WindowsNT-based software to apply repetitive loading histories to test specimens. A large assortment of high-accuracy extensometers are available to measure specimen shape change with applied load.
  • Instrumentation facilities allow the use of accelerometers and strain gages to capture static and dynamic specimen response.
• Simulation
  • Departmental computing facilities are used in conjunction with this lab to simulate testing procedures using non-linear finite element methods. Data from both experiment and simulation are compared to gain insight into failure processes.
• Residual Stress Measurement
  • Relaxation residual stress measurements are carried out using strain gage instrumentation in combination with cutting. Material removal is perfomed using wire EDM, available in Professor Yamazaki's IMS-Mechatronics Laboratory.
  • Diffraction residual stress measurements are performed using both x-ray and neutron beams. XRD can be performed using a Scintag XDS2000 X-ray diffractometer located in the ChEMS Department. ND can be carried out at Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE).
• Data Acquisition and Analysis
  • PC-based hardware and software is available for digital data acquisition using LabView, as well as data reduction and analysis.