Development Of A Biaxial Testing Apparatus

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, 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 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 to determine the strain rate of up to 11 𝑚𝑚/𝑚𝑖𝑛, as well as the type of loading (tension or compression) along each axis.