Experimental Methods

Simply attaching a few displacement transducers or strain gauges and measuring the test force is usually not enough to obtain reliably meaningful test results. Many small details are responsible for the fact that measurement results lose quality or cannot be used at all for the evaluation of the tests. Often, the storage conditions of both the test specimen and the transducers are not clear enough, or there are inconsiderate preloads resulting from installation tolerances and the like.

We analyse conventional experimental set-ups and measuring arrangements to find their weak points and to design and test new set-ups based on them. In addition, we develop new experimental concepts to optimise the relationship between effort and significance. The evaluation procedure is a fixed component of the overall concept.

The following examples should give a small insight into this field of work:

•     Torsion tests without constraints
•     Precision slip measurements
•     Hidden fatigue cracks in steel structures
•     Centric, constraint-free tensile tests without joints
•     Frictionless determination of constraint stresses in young reinforced concrete elements
•     Bulg and buckling tests
•     non-destructive determination of column forces in the structure
•     large-scale measurement of constrained internal forces