Design of NRL66.4: An Electro-Hydraulic 6-DoF Parallel Robotic Multiaxial Material Testing System

Abstract

Contemporary material testing applications such as high throughput material testing under realistic conditions, emulation of in-service loading conditions for the qualification of additively manufactured parts, material failure and damage propagation modeling validation and material constitutive characterization, are all underscoring the demand for an automated multiaxial testing capability. In order to address these needs, the present work introduces the initial progress of the design and prototyping of a 6 degrees of freedom (6-DoF) robotic system to be used as such a testing infrastructure. This system is designed to be capable of enforcing 6-DoF kinematic or force controlled boundary conditions on deformable material specimens, while at the same time measuring both the imposed kinematics and the corresponding reaction forces in a fully automated manner. Furthermore, as an extension to our previously prototyped systems, the system proposed here is designed to apply both quasi-static loading but also cyclic loading for enabling multiaxial fatigue studies. In addition to the architecture, the design and current status of its implementation for the most critical sub-systems is presented.