Development Of A Biaxial Testing Apparatus
<div>Material testing is a crucial part of engineering design and development, especially in aerospace engineering as it is more cost effective to test an element or component than doing a full-scale test on the completed part. Typically, uniaxial testing is carried out to characterize a material,</div><div>which is adequate for finding the properties of the material. However, these kinds of tests are inadequate for simulating the real-world loading that a component may experience in its life cycle. Therefore, this project’s goal was to develop a low-cost biaxial testing apparatus using off-the-shelf components, including the Arduino Uno microcontroller (“Arduino”), stepper motors (“motors”), and load cell. This report outlines the development of the software required to</div><div>operate the motors and read output value of the load cell. The Arduino code used to control the motors was developed using open-source code available on GitHub and the Stepper library, which contains the required functions for controlling the motors. The Arduino code can be used</div><div>to determine the strain rate of up to 11 𝑚𝑚/𝑚𝑖𝑛, as well as the type of loading (tension or compression) along each axis. </div>