The World of Automation for Materials Testing

Imagine your ideal day in the lab … Time on your hands to get work done, a safe environment for testing, and consistent test results that ultimately increase throughput. We hear from a lot of our customers – regardless of their application – that they are always looking for ways to improve their testing productivity and operator safety.

Using an automated testing system in your lab brings this new dimension of testing productivity directly to you: maximize efficiency by testing hundreds of specimens all the while the next specimen is being prepared; enable precise and consistent placement of specimens to eliminate errors; and ensure operator safety by alleviating safety gripping hazards.  This assisted process promotes maximum efficiency as skilled operators can focus on other priorities and testing can occur at a continuous and consistent pace.

Watch as the system runs with no operator intervention.

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Evaluating the Quality of High-Performance Plastics Molding

When chemical companies invest in developing high-performance polymers—such as filled polyesters, PA, PC, LCP, and PEEK—to engineer automotive and electronic components, they could potentially experience issues with a high melting temperature during the injection molding phase. It’s crucial to understand that even if the mold filling has been successfully executed, the molded parts can still show significant failures, such as cracks or warps and aesthetic defects. Therefore, those parts need to be discarded as the products’ quality has been affected. These production complications create material waste, inefficient machine time, increased operator labor, and decreased profitability.

Different techniques, carried out with dedicated equipment and experienced personnel, can be used for high-performance polymers analysis. However, this requires a lot of effort and delivers results from various sources, which often can’t be combined. This complex scenario can be simplified by using a capillary rheometer. 

R&D managers can test the materials before production with a capillary rheometer and simulate the material behavior under processing conditions. With the pvT accessory device, it is possible to estimate how the pressure and temperature affect the change in volume of polymers during the injection molding process.

The capillary rheometer equipped with the pvT device removes the production pains, making it possible for R&D to keep up with technological trends and the emerging high-performance polymer applications. Read more

How to Address Challenges in QC Medical Device Testing

We are proud to share that Meredith Platt, Director of Marketing & Emerging Markets for the Electromechanical Business, presented at the recent MEDTEC China event in September.

As Instron has developed many insights working with our customers in the biomedical industry, Meredith discussed challenges that QC laboratories encounter when testing a variety of medical devices, ranging from stents to catheters to spinal implants. Supporting the full product life cycle, she shared engineering solutions to assist product development, prototype evaluation, manufacturing, and delivery.

Here's a peek at her presentation:

ChallengesQCMedicalDeviceTesting_Sept2014 from Instron

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Is Design Validation Slowing Down Your Time To Market?

Instron interacts with many new product development labs that have a need to validate their new product or component design. Often part of this design validation requires mechanical testing. We have noticed a common need in these research and development labs to perform rapid "what if" analysis during design validation. That is, a test engineer often does not know the test speed, end of test value, etc. before pressing the start button on their Instron frame. Often the mechanical test is iterative and takes a trial-and-error approach. This type of "what if" analysis can be accelerated by using Expression Builder-driven parameters in Instron's Bluehill^® 3 Software.

Example:

You do not know the test speed or what maximum load you will need to apply to your product. So, you want to try several speeds and loads until the results look correct.

Add these variables as number inputs:

Using Expression Builder, select the number inputs appropriately for your test:

Now, in the workspace, you can simply type in different test speeds or maximum load criteria to validate your product taking a trial-and-error approach.

Using Expression Builder within Bluehill 3 should expedite your design validation process.

To learn more about the benefits of Expression Builder, this video may be helpful.

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