Equipment

Gleeble thermo-mechanical simulator

The Gleeble 3800 is a fully integrated digital closed loop thermal and mechanical testing system. Specimens can be heated at rates up to a maximum 10,000 °C/s by resistance heating, or can be held at constant temperature. It is capable of exerting up to 20 tonnes of static force in compression or 10 tonnes in tension, with applied displacement rates up to 2 m/s. Feedback consists of linear variable differential transformers, load cells or non-contact laser extensometry.

High rate testing machines

There are 25 Tonne (up to 5 m/s) and 2 Tonne (up to 25 m/s) testing machines available for high strain rate tests. These machines are important for studying strain-rate dependent effects such as work hardening and can be used for ballistics research.

Creep age forming

Creep age forming is a sheet forming technique used for producing aircraft wing and fuselage panels with small deflections and complex curvatures. This test setup incorporates Instron (Software: Blue hill), Datalogger (Software: PicoLog), Strain gage and furnace, enabling accurate control of the samples’ s strain and properties. Designed loading and creep/stress-relaxation programmes can be realized using the Instron. Simultaneously, temperatures (up to 250 ˚C) can be applied to the sample to exploit the age hardening response, where the data logger is used to strictly control the temperature within 1˚C of the set temperature. The creep strain was measured using the strain gauge. This whole set up enables CAF simulation on the uniaxial samples, to achieve the basic creep ageing behaviours, which is necessary for establishing CAF constitutive equations for FE simulation of components with a range of geometries.   

Microstructure characterisation

A state-of-the-art atomic force microscope (AFM) and high resolution scanning electron microscope (SEM) with EDS and EBSD are available for materials microstructure measurement. Other equipment is readily available through close collaboration with the Department of Materials, e.g. transmission electron microscope (TEM), focused ion beam (FIB) and nanoindenter. The group also has a range of optical microscopes and equipment for specimen preparation.

Computational systems

The new system MecToR is available for exclusive use, currently consisting of 40 AMD Opteron CPU cores with a total of 640 GBytes of memory for memory-intensive large parallel and batch serial jobs. Several other advanced computer clusters are available, such as the Imperial College High Performance Computer (HPC) systems, a Dell PC cluster with 1860 Intel Xeon CPU cores, and a total of 3.46 TBytes of memory and 30 TBytes of storage and an SGI Altix shared memory system with 62 Intel Itanium CPU cores and 128 GBytes of memory. Several smaller clusters for parallel computations are also available for group usage.

Software

• ABAQUS
• QFORM
• Deform 3D