The Testing Times

The Tinius Olsen Testing Machine Company has been providing materials testing systems to the manufacturing industry for over 135 years, pulling, pushing, squeezing, bursting and twisting packaging materials, enclosures, and packaging devices to accurately quantify strength, performance and quality. Using the data from a Tinius Olsen testing system QC Mangers and their teams are able to monitor, prove and maintain the quality of their products, be it tapes, adhesives, plastic film, metal foil, bottles, enclosures, bags and devices. The key business needs; Efficiency, immediate feedback of test results to the production team and traceability are all met by the new Tinius Olsen automated materials testing platform. The item to be tested is passed automatically into the Testing Cell, then handled by a six axis robot, it can be dimensional checked, loaded into the tensile testing machine and tested. Immediately post-test the Pass/Fail status is reported, and the robot sorts

Tinius Olsen's  2D strain mapping option software is available for existing and new video extensometer installations for use with the Standard and Advanced software products. 2D strain mapping is used to give a graphical representation of the strain amounts varying across a specimen during a test, illustrating the non-uniform strain taking place.  Pictured strain map of a tensile specimen at break Typically users take these pictures and include them in report analysis and conclusions alongside standard results and graphs adding to the data and overall analysis of a material or components performance under load. Check out this clip of a flexural specimen under test and strain mapped;  

I often get asked “Why do your large Brinell hardness testers not have a clamp option” The answer begins with understanding why old technology Brinell testers had and required a clamp feature. They were dead weight machines i.e. the load (in the case of regular Brinell 3000kg) was applied using actual physical weights hanging inside the machine. If a work piece or component was not clamped it could move as the weight was applied thus resulting in an indentation in the metal which could be less than the true size due to the movement. So A clamp was used to pre clamp the work piece or component thus stopping it from moving as the load was applied ensuring a true sized indentation. However a modern closed loop Brinell tester like the Tinius Olsen models FH-009, FH-008, FH-012 do not use dead weights, this means clamping of the work piece is not required. This is because the closed loop system sampling and applying the 3000kg force ensures, very accurately, that the tester keeps