The Testing Times

Tinius Olsen plays a crucial role in ensuring safety-critical fasteners for wind turbines reach the marketplace at the highest quality possible. Global manufacturers Cooper & Turner, who have established operations in the UK, China and USA, have been a vital part of the renewable energy industry for over two decades, producing bolts and fixings for the entire wind turbine structure. This includes towers in some remote and challenging environments, such as offshore wind farms. “We started servicing the wind turbine market more than 25 years ago, long before it became an integral part of the global energy supply,” says David Briggs, Head of Global Quality and Technical Information at the Cooper and Turner Group.  “The manufacture and provision of high quality, safety-critical fasteners, with the ability to operate in some of the most hostile environments in the world, has gained us an unrivalled reputation in the wind turbine marketplace.” Quality control and s

Shawn Byrd, Technical Manager at Tinius Olsen, takes a look at the revolution in the world of extensometry with the increasing use of video extensometers, their applications, operation and features. Shawn's primary focus at Tinius Olsen is on materials testing and the application of various standards to different testing platforms that help evaluate materials and products.  He is a member of ASTM Committees C09 on Concrete and Concrete Aggregates, D30 on Composite Materials, E28 on Mechanical Testing, and F16 on Fasteners. Involved with independent testing labs in the United States, China, India, and Singapore, he has also completed numerous Nadcap, American Association for Laboratory Accreditation, and ISO audits. Video Extensometry Improvements in both video technology and computer software has a new generation of non-contact extensometers coming to the fore; the video extensometer.  Video extensometers have many advantages. They give users greater f

Tinius Olsen has helped one of the leading Technical Colleges in America, the Cincinnati State Technical and Community College, to up-grade and further develop its materials testing laboratory.  This is the culmination of a partnership between the two organisations that goes back to the establishment of the College in 1969, as Mike DeVore, Professor & Program Chair of the Mechanical Engineering Technology & Welding Technology Dept explains: “I started teaching at Cincinnati State 29 years ago and at that time we had a very old Tinius Olsen tensile test machine that still worked extremely well on a day to day basis.”    “Our testing lab had been in operation since almost the establishment of the school so we decided to update our lab in 1993 and, due to the reliability and generally good history that we had with the old machine, I decided to purchase another from Tinius Olsen.”  “I visited the factory in Pennsylvania and was very impressed with the quality of

Successful manufacturing relies on quality and productivity. Testing machines are  used to demonstrate the quality of raw materials such as steel alloys, composites, plastics and rubber as well as components including medical devices, packaging materials and fasteners. Manufacturing processes today are typically automated to a greater or lesser extent, although the quality process is often manual. This is generally time consuming, involving entering reference data, performing test  procedures, reporting on the results, preparing the testing machine, starting the test, qualifying and accepting the results and appending comments before removing the materials.  Historically, materials testing has been an operator using single or multiple stations. This can be uneconomical in terms of operator time where speed is  crucial – for example in testing threaded fasteners for the aerospace industry, testing is required 24 hours a day.  Drug delivery in the biomedical

Back in July last year two laboratory test technicians were sent to jail in Hong Kong for falsifying compression test results on concrete cubes at the contract test lab Jacobs. At the time of discovering the issue 19 lab techs were arrested. See more... And now a NASA investigation has sighted “Altered test results” behind the failure of a clamshell structure that encapsulates satellites as they travel through the atmosphere as being responsible for the failure of its Taurus XL Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) and Glory missions in 2009 and 2011, respectively. See more ... The issue of stakeholders falsifying results or editing reports in the materials or device manufacture and test verification supply chain is not new, way back in 2000’s the medical industry was hit by the problem initially identified in India’s drug and medical device industry, then found in Germany’s and on and on, this contributed to the USA FDA’s work in 2000’s and finally the issue of 21 CFR Pa

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;