Material Testing Laboratory

BioMater Centre provides material testing services for companies and research groups. Testing is carried out in the material testing laboratory by either non-destructive or destructive testing.
The facilities include the following equipment or services, some of them have a detailed description:

• Material testing with Instron equipment
• Fine-mechanical material testing
• Hip joint simulator
• Impedance measurements
• Ultrasound imaging
• Infrared camera
• Roughness measurements

Enquiries to professor Reijo Lappalainen.

Contact info:
prof. Reijo Lappalainen
mobile: +358-40-355 2564
email: reijo.lappalainen[at]uef.fi

Applications and methods

Destructive material testing methods are needed when the other methods are inadequate. These physical quantities are for example strength, fatique and friction. In the BioMater-Centre we have various material testing equipment (compression, tension, torsion, bending), friction and wear testing devices including pin-on-disk, pin-on-flat, hip joint simulator and cyclic fatique testing equipment.

Ultrasound

Our ultrasound imaging equipment enables the research of material structure non-destructively. It can be used in frequency band between 0.2 and 100 Mhz which makes high resolution tomographs possible horizontally and vertically from the target.

High frequency imaging ultrasound equipment.

Mechanical testing

Our mechanical testing equipment enables traditional static loading tests but also more specific tests with dynamically changing load or displacement. Instron Fast Track 8874 (in fig. below) can be used in various mechanical tests. These are for example compression, tension and three-point bending tests to determine mechanical preferences, such as elasticity, hardness and strength for different materials.

Instron FastTrack 8874 mechanical testing equipment.

Hip joint simulator

Our hip joint simulator made by Shore Western can be used simultaneously with six rotational stations for anatomical simulations and six static stations as controls. Specific tests may for last years but faster simulations are preferred. Rotation stations are for ball joint such as hip simulations. With hydraulics the joint gets cyclic load and the rotational motion is made by mechanics. The loading curve can be chosen that repeats within every each cycle. Loading force can be set up to 5000 N.

Six-station hip joint simulator made by Shore Western, Monrovia, CA, USA.

Cyclic fatique testing equipment

Friction, wear, corrosion and fatique can be measured with different ways. In figure shows a self-made instrument that can be used for long fatique tests of samples. The peak load can be set between 0-250 N and the cycle frequency between 0.2-10Hz (1Hz equals one cycle per second).

Cyclic fatique testing equipment.