We received incredible feedback from everyone who tried our Virtual Reality. After their experience, an applications engineer from Oriental Motor UK stated “It’s immersive, shows a lot of the product range and helped me to understand the products”.






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Issue 9
Composite materials consist of two or more distinct phases. The most common type of high-performance composite materials are those consisting of continuous carbon or glass fibers embedded in a polymer matrix. These composite materials are now used in a wide range of critical structural applications.
Generally, the mechanical properties of composite materials depend on the material's direction. Determining the tension, compression, and shear properties of composite materials requires a wide range of mechanical tests. The measurement of strain is a key requirement in all of these tests.
Traditional approaches to strain measurement in composites testing use contacting methods involving either bonded strain gauges or clip-on extensometers. However, recent developments in non-contacting strain measurement allow these systems to offer similar performance compared to contacting systems, as well as providing other benefits such as the ability to provide full-field strain maps.
Early in the design cycle, the modeling and simulation of composite components for use in demanding structural applications requires a detailed knowledge of the properties of these anisotropic and inhomogeneous materials. The determination of these properties requires a wide range of mechanical tests, possibly over a range of temperatures, on materials conditioned in a variety of different environments. Later in the design cycle, mechanical tests on composite components are often employed to validate models by comparing model predictions to measurements on prototypes.
Instron recently attended the Advanced Engineering 2016 exhibition in Birmingham UK. This exhibition included Composites Engineering 2016. The exhibition gave us a chance to demonstrate our products and capabilities. We had application experts on the stand; they stayed busy speaking with both existing and new potential customers on a variety of topics.
We demonstrated a number of products including:
We received incredible feedback from everyone who tried our Virtual Reality. After their experience, an applications engineer from Oriental Motor UK stated “It’s immersive, shows a lot of the product range and helped me to understand the products”.