Daytona Beach Campus - College of Engineering

Department of Aerospace Engineering

Structures and Aging Aircraft Lab

184 Lehman Building

Contact Person: Eric Hill

 

Description

Floor PlanThis laboratory occupies 2200 square feet on the first floor of the Lehman Building. Access is from an interior hallway. Other doorways lead to a student projects room (LB 183), to the Machine Shop (LB185) and the Wood Shop (LB188).

Equipment

  • 10,000 lb MTS Universal Testing Machine with digital controller and water-cooled hydraulics power supply, with environmental chamber.
  • 10,000 lb MTS actuator with digital controller and water-cooled hydraulics power supply.
  • Vibration Test Systems 500 lb electrodynamic shaker table with computer controller/data acquisition unit and Techron 5330 power supply amplifier.
  • Ling Electronics 50 lb shaker electrodynamic shaker table with power supply, function generator and controller.
  • Ling Electronics 30 lb shaker table with power supply.
  • Multi-purpose, very heavy-duty, structures test stand (10 by 20 ft footprint, 10 ft high).
  • Environmental corrosion test chamber (salt or acid spray).
  • Landing gear drop test apparatus.
  • Physical Acoustics 4-channel acoustic emission detection system with MISTRAS data-acquisition software.
  • Pressure vessel burst chamber.
  • 22 inch by 22 inch ULTRAPAC II submersible ultrasonic inspection system.
  • Manual, low capacity torsion tester.
  • 3 stand-alone PC's (Dec, ProLogic,IBM 450 DX2).
  • Software packages include Neural Works Professional II+ neural network prototyping and development system.
  • 400 lb scale.
  • Pressure transducer calibrator.
  • Type I & II Magnaflux liquid penetrant test kit
  • Type II fixed & contour Magnaflux magnetic particle test kit (AC)
  • Hocking Phasec 2200 Eddy-Current inspection unit with a 500kHz Hocking probe and assorted calibration blocks.
  • Quantum PE Ultrasonic inspection unit with straight and angled transducers and assorted calibration blocks.
  • Curlin-Air airborn ultrasonic flaw detector with wide band transducers.
  • A large variety of supporting instrumentation and equipment including accelerometers, Tektronix storage oscilloscopes, Hewlett-Packard function generators, spectrum analyzers, AC and DC standard voltage references and power supplies, digital thermometers, multi-channel strain gage conditioners, multimeters, multichannel data acquisition units, connecting cables, strain gages and application kits, accelerometers.
  • Overhead projector.

Utilization

The equipment in this room is used to test structures and components typical of those found in aircraft and spacecraft. The kinds of standard tests which can be done include uniaxial tension/compression, bending, torsion, fatigue, vibration and corrosion, as well as ultrasonic and acoustic emission nondestructive testing. Specialized structures, typical of wings, fuselages and trusses, are mounted on the large blue frame visible in the above photos and are subjected to loads applied by a 10,000 lb capacity hydraulic ram. Strain gages are used to measure the stresses. This laboratory is used in a variety of courses to investigate structural behavior under static and dynamic loading and for graduate research projects and contracts with industry.

Civil engineering student tests the compressive strength of a wood model of his space truss design