What is it about?
Composite materials must go through extensive testing before their adoption in flight-ready spacecraft. We have demonstrated a testing method that generates mechanical property data under a wide range of conditions in a single experiment using gradient fields and full-field measurements.
Featured Image
Photo by NASA Hubble Space Telescope on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Contrary to conventional methods that characterize materials under a single stress value, our method imposes a continuous range of stress all at once, leading to a significant increase in data yield in each experiment. This strategy accelerates advanced material development and adoption in spacecraft by removing the bottleneck in test validation. We apply the high-throughput method for measuring long-term viscoelastic behavior of ultrathin composites employed in deployable starshade and solar sail structures.
Perspectives
Writing this article was a rewarding experience. It has inspired us to reimagine mechanical testing which is performed so much by engineers and where standards are not catching up with modern design needs.
Dr. Kawai Kwok
Purdue University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: High-Throughput Viscoelastic Testing for Composite Laminates, January 2024, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA),
DOI: 10.2514/6.2024-0608.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
