Download or read book Micro-Tensile Test Technique Development and Application to Mechanical Property Determination written by R. Procházka and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 19 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The evaluation of the actual mechanical properties of in-service structures after a period of operation or the determination of local properties for detailed finite element method (FEM) simulation requires relevant material data obtained with high accuracy from a small volume of the experimental material. Therefore, non-destructive or semi-destructive techniques using small samples are being developed. The use of small-scale samples also enables the evaluation of material properties in various locations of tested components--for example, the mechanical properties of isolated regions of welds. One of the widely used methods in miniature specimen testing is the small punch test (SPT). The SPT is usually based on conversion of the obtained results into conventional parameters such as tensile properties, creep, fatigue, notch toughness, transition temperature, or fracture toughness parameters, but it requires known correlation parameters determined for the specific material. It was considered whether there is really a need to convert values from an SPT if there is not a chance to perform, for example, tensile tests directly on the same volume of experimental material as used in the SPT. Preliminary FEM analysis was performed with subsequent experimental verification of the possibility of testing small tensile samples with the following dimensions: active part length, 3 mm; width, 1.5 mm; and thickness, 0.5 mm. On the basis of promising preliminary results, testing fixtures for micro-tensile samples were developed together with a testing procedure. The performance of the micro-tensile test method relative to standard tensile tests is shown here together with its application to weld characterization.