The Materials and Metrology Laboratory is used by undergraduate students in a number of laboratory classes including Materials Science and Introduction to Manufacturing. It is also used by students in the design laboratory courses when they need to assess properties of metal, polymer and composite materials they are using in their designs and it is used in experiments relating to materials or measurement of physical dimensions.
The overall purpose of the laboratory twofold. One purpose relates directly to the assessment of physical properties of materials and microstructure of metals and composites. The other purpose is the precise measurement of the physical dimensions of mechanical parts.
Equipment used by students to assess material properties:
- Rockwell Hardness Tester
- Charpy Impact Tester
- 100 kN Universal Testing Machine with load cell, long and short extensometers and computer work station
- Metallurgical cut off machine
- Metallurgical grinder/polisher's
- Sample mounting facilities
- Etchant facilities
- Trinocular bright field microscope
- Inverted, trinocular bright field microscope
- Computer capture video camera micograpy for microscopes
- Spectrometer for measuring alloy composition of ferrous alloys.
Equipment used by students to perform measurement:
- Mitutoyo instrument sets for basic linear measure metrology including:
- 1, 2 and, 3 inch micrometers
- 2 to 8 inch internal micrometer
- Dial calipers
- Tri & miter square with angle head and center head
- Dial indicators and magnetic base
- Surface plates with and without dial height gages
- Precision dial height gage
- Low power microscope with video camera and computer image capture
- Graduated reticle and stage micrometer to adapt bright field microscopes for micro measurement.
- Software for linear, area, perimeter etc computation on video capture
- Optical comparitor with silhouette and face illumination and digital readout
Dr. Sara McCaslin is the faculty member responsible for the Materials and Metrology Laboratory