New tension mechanism for high-speed tensile testing machine

As concerns of dynamic tensile measuring, a new tension mechanism driven by liner motor in high-speed tensile testing machine is presented. It satisfies the requirements for testing the dynamic tensile properties of plastic materials with strain rates from 1 to 100 s-1, which is relatively difficult to test for currently available machines. For this purpose the idle stroke principle is used to realize the dynamic load of plastic material with static grip. Computer aided engineering is used: i) to analyze and optimize the tension mechanism thus allowing reducing the system shock caused by collisions. ii) to avoid the influence of plastic materials specimen stress and strain uniformity on the measuring system. The analysis results agreed well with the established empirical relationships based on experimental evidence. Two sets of experiments for different strain rate tensile were conducted thus allowing proving the reliability and credibility of the designed tension mechanism.