The Mechanics of Materials Laboratory is used for demonstrating phenomena related to stress, strain, buckling, and fatigue. Many of the experiments in this laboratory are interfaced to a computer, and data acquisition is performed using LabVIEW. The student workstations are complete instrumentation lab benches, data acquisition, and computer data analysis stations featuring Agilent 60-MHz oscilloscopes, 20 MHz programmable function/arbitrary waveform generators, and 6.5 digit digital multimeters. The stations also include 0-30V/0-5A triple output power supplies and custom portable bioamplifiers for biopotential measurements. Each workstation computer (PC) is equipped with a National Instruments multifunction 12-bit analog and digital input/output board driven by MATLAB and LabVIEW software packages for data acquisition, processing, analysis, and the development of virtual bioinstrumentation. The laboratory is supplemented with a Beckman spectrophotometer for studying absorbance and transmittance, as well as enzyme kinetics and quantitation and analysis of protein and nucleic acids, a benchtop pH meter for electrode and pH sensor design and analysis, and other equipment such as an analytical balance, centrifuge, and light microscope for sample preparation and analysis.
A 22 kip capacity MTS 810 as well as a 5 kip capacity MTS 858 Mini-Bionix II test machine are also housed in this laboratory. The MTS 810, designed for static and dynamic tension-compression testing, is available for traditional wear testing, material classification, and bone fracture characterization, including crack propagation.