Cardiff School of Engineering
EN1029 Laboratory 2
Mechanical Tests (MT)
Christopher Montague
C1121903
15/02/2012
DECLARATION
In submitting this report, I hereby declare that, except where I have made clear and full reference to the work of others, this submission, and all the material (e.g. text, pictures, diagrams) contained in it, is my own work, has not previously been submitted for assessment, and I have not knowingly allowed it to be copied by another student. In the case of group projects, the contribution of group members has been appropriately quantified. I understand that deceiving, or attempting to deceive, examiners by passing off the work of another as my own is plagiarism. I also understand that plagiarising another's work, or knowingly allowing another student to plagiarise from my work, is against University
Regulations and that doing so will result in loss of marks and disciplinary proceedings. I understand and agree that the University’s plagiarism software ‘Turnitin’ may be used to check the originality of the submitted coursework.
SIGNED: CHRISTOPHER MONTAGUE
ABSTRACT
For this experiment, a series of mechanical tests were carried out on a variety of metal specimens, which included applying tensile force and calculating the Vickers Hardness of three different steel specimens, as well as measuring the creep of a lead specimen over a ten‐minute time period. Three forms of testing equipment were used, including a
Vickers Hardness Testing Machine and a Tensile Testing Machine. The results from the first of these tests showed that the tempered steel specimen was able to withstand the most force, followed by the quenched specimen, whilst the normalised specimen had the highest Vickers Hardness out of all three specimens. The results from the creep test showed that, as expected, the creep rate was linear for the majority of the testing period, until the latter stages where the rate increased significantly before failure occurred.
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Chris Montague C1121903
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page No.
1 Introduction
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2 Theory
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3 Experimental Procedures
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3.1 Tensile Strength Testing Procedure
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3.2 Vickers Hardness Testing Procedure
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3.3 Creep Testing Procedure
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4 Results
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4.1 Vickers Hardness Results
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4.2 Tensile Strength Results
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4.3 Creep Results
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5 Discussion
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6 Conclusion
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7 References
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8 Appendices
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Chris Montague C1121903
1. INTRODUCTION
Mechanical testing is important in civil engineering as it can be used to gain knowledge on mechanical properties on different materials, such as hardness and tensile strength.
Development of knowledge on these properties can be found through experimentation and is vital as these properties can become the cause of failure in a design if not considered fully. Such knowledge can be obtained by analysing the results from certain experiments carried out, such as the Vickers Hardness test, the tensile strength test and the creep test carried out in this experiment. Before carrying out these tests, the theory of each topic needed to be established and the appropriate equipment setup and prepared for the testing of each specimen. The basic theory behind
