Design of fixtures and specimens for high strain-rate tensile testing on a drop tower

Drop towers are used to perform mechanical tests at strain rates similar to those experienced in automobile crashes. By their nature, drop towers are configured to perform compression tests only. This project aims to design a set of fixtures and specimens to allow the machine to perform tensile tests. Two major design options were considered and analyzed using engineering mechanics and finite element analysis. The design selected used a double dog-bone specimen bent into a "U"-shape and impacted by a weighted force sensor with a steel tup attached to the bottom. The appropriate fixtures were designed. Future work on this project includes manufacturing of the fixtures, design and construction of a method for creating the specimens, and physical tensile tests using the new machine configuration.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Mechanical Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Chan, Jason J. (Jason Joseph)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Tomasz Wierzbicki.

• Mechanical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/54529

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/54529