Probabilistic Physics of Failure and Fracture Mechanics Lab
Research Topics:
MTS Uniaxial Fatigue Testing Machines
- Two-post and Four-post machines rating at ±100kN in tension or compression under static and cyclic conditions.
- Fatigue Life Assessment Based on Energy Release
- Fatigue Crack Initiation Based on Entropy Generation
Optical Microscopy for Short Fatigue Crack
- 25 to 10X Microscope with C-mount adaptor for the video port. Simultaneous visual and video viewing.
- Short crack detection in fatigue
- Visualization of crack growth
Acoustic Emission Technique for Crack Initiation and Growth
- Sensors and amplifiers to collect and amplify the signals.
- Data acquisition module to perform front-end filtration and record the signals
- Software module to visualize the data and to perform the required analysis such as feature extraction and source location
- Assessment of crack initiation
- Large crack growth modeling
- Information entropy analysis of AE signals for crack initiation
- Thermodynamic entropy and information (Shannon) entropy as measures of damage in materials
- Acoustic emission signal analysis for extracting features sensitive to damage
- Acoustic emission features as precursors of damage
- Parametric approach and histogram-based approach to estimation of the acoustic entropy
Heating Chamber for Creep Testing
- Exposure of specimen under controlled heat up to 700oC
- Probabilistic modeling of creep
- Fatigue-creep testing capability
Corrosive Medium Chamber
- Probabilistic corrosion-Fatigue model development in piping.
- Probabilistic pitting corrosion in pipes
- Probabilistic stress corrosion in piping
- Environmental testing chamber with elevated temperature and salt spray to accelerate degradation
- Advanced condition monitoring
system to monitor diverse key performance indicators (i.e., temperature, flow rate, differential pressure, and conductivity). - Vibration Monitoring and Acoustic Emission Monitoring systems to diagnose machine failures, continuously track health degradation, and predict remaining useful life of rotating machinery