Design and Fabrication of a Three-Point Bending Test Rig to Evaluate Strength and Stiffness of I-Beam

I-beam is widely used as main structures in the automotive and oil and gas industries due to their ability to sustain axial load at very minimum weight. For any structure, the important parameter should put into considerations are strength and stiffness. A Three-point bending test is a well-known method to evaluate the strength and stiffness of a beam. The existing machine to perform a three-point bending test is the Instron® 5585 Universal Testing Machines (UTM). However, these machines can only measure specimen within 500 mm which is insufficient for a longer specimen. In this study, a new design testing rig was proposed to evaluate the strength and stiffness of the longer specimen of I-beam. For this study, the design of the testing rig was evaluated using finite element analysis for 3 different lengths to determine its strength and rigidity. From this analysis, it is found that the proposed design of a testing rig shows satisfactory strength and rigidity for the length of 500 mm to 1000 mm when loaded with 10 kN force.