Tensile Testing

Tensile testing is done to figure out the properties of engineering materials. Perhaps you're going to build a bridge out of steel?....you first need to know how strong that steel is going to be.

Its also a key lesson for engineering students, to teach them about what material properties mean, and how to calculate them.

But what can you do to make tensile testing more interesting than just a data-gathering exercise?

In this lab, we get every group to collaborate towards a building big pooled dataset, which shows results from across all the tests carried in the session, and in fact the whole year group.

Students see this data set evolving over time, and how they are contributing to it.

They can then take an average from these results of say... Tensile Strength data, and use it later in their design & build project.

This makes each group feel part of a central goal - to get a good quality and reliable set of data.

Displaying all the results together (scatter) also illustrates some key points about errors, uncertainty and variability within tensile testing.