Home > Facilities & equipment
The Mechanics of Materials and Structures research group has a large number of facilities for research on impact, fatigue, NDT&E,... Below a list of the available facilities is listed, split up in two categories:
| Experimental facilities |
- Impact
- two drop weight towers (2.5 m and 6 m drop height)
- high strain-rate hydraulic tensile machine (strain rates up to 100-200/s)
- three digital high speed cameras (up to 250,000 fps)
- high-end transient recorder/oscilloscope (up to 100 MHz sampling rate)
- dynamic load cells, accelerometers, displacement sensors
- bird strike set-up for real birds and gelatine replicas
- pneumatic launcher
- pendulum impact test rig for glass windows
- lab-scale set-up for slamming wave impact
- Charpy impact tests (dynamic fracture toughness)
- Compression After Impact (CAI) test set-up
- high strain-rate hydraulic tensile machine (strain rates up to 100-200/s)
- Fatigue
- two servohydraulic machines
- electric actuator for multi-axial tension/compression/torsion fatigue
- set-up for fully-reversed cantilever bending fatigue
- accessoiries for tension-compression and pure shear testing
- devices for 3- and 4-point bending
- two extensometers
- electrical resistance measurement
- surface mounted and embedded optical fibre sensors
- online Digital Image Correlation (DIC) for fatigue measurement of strain/hysteresis/stiffness reduction
- Rotating Bending Beam fatigue
- electric actuator for multi-axial tension/compression/torsion fatigue
- NDT/NDE
- ultrasound scanning facility for C-scans and polar scans
- high-frequency ultrasound (up to 75 MHz) for inspection of very small defects
- air-coupled ultrasound for low-frequency inspection (order 100's kHz)
- ultrasound phased array (64 probes)
- 3D infrared scanning laser vibrometer Polytec PSV-500-3D (up till 25 MHz)
- active thermography with cooled infrared camera FLIR A6750sc and Edevis software
- high frequency PCRT set-up for NDT of AM metals
- 2D and 3D Digital Image Correlation (static and high-speed)
- optical fibre sensors and read-out equipment (up to 2 kHz)
- shadow and projection moire
- Schlieren set-up for acousto-optics research
- Optical microscopy and Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM)
- Online video-microscopy
- X-ray micro-tomography
- Dielectric Analysis (DEA) for curing analysis
- high-frequency ultrasound (up to 75 MHz) for inspection of very small defects
- General mechanics of composite materials
- electromechanical testing machine with temperature chamber (-150 C to +350 C)
- electrodynamic shaker (up to 10 kHz)
- set-up for measurement of modal frequencies and frequency-dependent modal damping
- test set-ups for static and dynamic testing of racing bicycle frames
- fracture mechanics tests for composites and polymers (DCB, ENF, ELS, TDCB, CT)
- fracture mechanics tests for adhesives (dolly testing, DCB testing)
- long-term experience with outdoor field testing without electrical grid connection (sailing yachts, wave energy devices, bicycle frames,…)
- hand lay-up and vacuum assisted resin transfer moulding
- infrared welding set-up
- autoclave with cure monitoring
- hydraulic press with vacuum frames for thermoplastic composite manufacturing up till 400 degrees Celsius
- filament winding machine
- measurement of fibre volume fraction of carbon and glass fibre composites
- electrodynamic shaker (up to 10 kHz)
- two drop weight towers (2.5 m and 6 m drop height)
| Numerical facilities |
- Commercial software
- implicit and explicit finite element suite ABAQUS
- explicit finite element code LS-Dyna
- implicit finite element code Siemens-NX
- Digimat software for mean-field homogenization (e-XStream/MSC Software)
- Mimics Innovation suite for medical image segmentation and 3D printing design
- open source finite element code Code_Aster
- HyperMesh and Gmsh high-performance finite-element pre-processors
- composite draping software (Catia/CPD, Simulayt/Composite Modeler)
- software for kinematics and multibody dynamics (Universal Mechanism)
- optimization software (iSight, evolutionary strategies)
- numerical software (Mathcad, Matlab, Maple, Mathematica)
- CAD/CAE software (SolidWorks, Catia)
- data acquisition software (LabVIEW)
- Digital Image Correlation (DIC) software Vic3D (Correlated Solutions)
- explicit finite element code LS-Dyna
- In-house developments
- SERVE: Statistically Equivalent Representative Volume Element (RVE) software
- ORAS: Object-Oriented RVE Assembly Software
- Blade Mesher: meshing tools for large wind turbine blades
- five workstations for intensive calculations
- parallel computing infrastructure for finite element calculations (12000+ cores, 3.2 Terabyte RAM)
- supernode with 720 GB RAM
- ORAS: Object-Oriented RVE Assembly Software
- implicit and explicit finite element suite ABAQUS