Volume 21.1

With grateful thanks for the support of our clients and partners, DatapointLabs marks the twentieth anniversary of our founding and the start of our third decade of providing the material properties required for new product development, CAE, and R&D.

Through our first 20 years, we have continuously pushed boundaries to expand our capabilities—in testing technology and methods, as well as in the types of materials tested. We now serve a growing global clientele of more than 1200 companies in 35 countries. We partner with more than 20 software providers to support more than 30 codes with TestPaks^® to provideload & go material properties and formatted material input cards for CAE and FEA. Our seasoned, expert technical team operates an ISO 17025 certified laboratory to test virtually any materials used in the products of today—and tomorrow.

Today, DatapointLabs and its affiliate, Matereality, together provide material properties testing and software for material data visualization, CAE parameter conversion, and materials information management for manufacturing enterprises.

In our 20th anniversary year, DatapointLabs is the first commercial laboratory in the US to offer dynamic tensile testing at speeds up to 20 m/s.

The company has just brought into service a new, high-speed tensile testing machine from Shimadzu. Dynamic properties are becoming extremely important as fundamental data for product design and R&D, particularly in the automotive, consumer products, electronic, and appliances industries, where product safety and reliability considerations are of paramount concern. Coupled with the installation of a Photron SA5 camera, which is able to capture up to one million frames per second, DatapointLabs can now employ non-contact video extensometry to measure data at strain rates as high as 1000 /s.

The M-235 Very High Speed Tensile Stress-Strain test can be added to existing TestPaks^® for rate dependent applications, such as Abaqus *Rate Dependent, Digimat MX Crash (EVP), LS-Dyna MAT24 and SAMP-1, and MSC.Dytran DYMAT24 models, and PAM-CRASH software (G-174, G-520, G-602, G-712, G-771, G-778, and G-871).

DatapointLabs founder and SPE Fellow Hubert Lobo will talk about Challenges in the Modeling of Plastics in Computer Simulation at the Fundamentals in Plastics forum presented by SPE Fellows at ANTEC^® Orlando 2015, which takes place on March 23-25, 2015 in conjunction with NPE 2015 in Orlando, FL.

Abstract: Finite-element analysis and injection-molding simulation are two technologies that are seeing widespread use today in the design of plastic components. Limitations exist in our ability to mathematically describe the complexity of polymer behavior to these software packages. Material models commonly used in finite-element analysis were not designed for plastics, making it difficult to correctly describe non-linear behavior and plasticity of these complex materials. Time-based viscoelastic phenomena further complicate analysis. Dealing with fiber fillers brings yet another layer of complexity. It is vital to the plastics engineer to comprehend these gaps in order to make good design decisions. Approaches to understanding and dealing with these challenges, including practical strategies for everyday use, will be discussed.

New stress relaxation fixtures are now available for measuring force/stress decay over long periods of time. Rubber samples are placed into the compression relaxation frames, compressed to a predetermined strain, and force decay is captured with a load cell over long time intervals.

This test is useful for determining stress retention and long term performance of seals and gaskets. Testing can be performed at various temperatures as well as at large strains. The data may be applicable to capture non-linear viscoelastic behavior for the new PRF material model framework from Abaqus. Look for M-266 Long Term Instrumented Stress Relaxation in the Test Catalog.

In response to a robust demand over the past year, we have expanded our capacity to perform creep testing at both ambient temperature and elevated temperatures. See our Test Catalog to order M-250 Tensile Creep, M-251 Compressive Creep, M-252 Flexural Creep, M-254 Creep Rupture, or M-255 All-Round Notch Creep individual tests, or TestPaksincluding these tests.

  strengthening the materials core of manufacturing enterprises  

95 Brown Road #102, Ithaca, NY 14850 USA | Toll-free: +1-888-DATA-4-CAE | Tel: +1-607-266-0405 | EU, tel: +353 1 442 9204 | info@datapointlabs.com