The MRSEC Facilities Network is a nationwide partnership of NSF supported MRSEC centers designed to provide support to researchers in the broad area of Materials Research in academic, government and industrial laboratories around the world.
Mechanical Processing Laboratory
This Laboratory provides a collection of instruments that measure the
mechanical properties of polymeric solids under shear or elongational
deformations. Stresses and strains can be imposed in a variety of
steady or dynamic modes with options for controlling the temperature
and humidity parameters under which these experiments occur, by
employing enclosed environmental chambers.
Seven Instron instruments form the core of
equipment available to the polymer research community. Two of the
Instrons are servo-hydraulically operated while the other five are
screw driven. Each instrument can be fitted with an assortment of
peripheral equipment such as load cells, specimen grips, sample chamber
and test fixtures. An additional pair of Instron instruments function
as capillary melt rheometers. Complementing this array are two
deformation calorimeters, a high pressure gas dilatometer, and a
Dynostat dynamic-mechanical testing apparatus, all of which can monitor
the evolution of sample properties under static and dynamic tensile
loads.
The Mechanical Properties Laboratory has pioneered the use of
holographic interferometry to examine the mechanical properties and
stresses of thin films and maintains equipment capable of providing
parameters such as simple density, porosity, and particle size. A
torsion pendulum device is available for determining the shear modulus
of films and fibers.
